Advanced Circuits PCB fab

Wed Sep 01, 2010 9:30 pm   

Anyone else using these guys find that their silk screening is not on
par with the quality of the rest of the board?

Wed Sep 01, 2010 9:30 pm   

oparr_at_hotmail.com wrote:


I did some real tiny font stuff there, where my layouter began to feel a
bit uneasy about it. Worked.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Wed Sep 01, 2010 9:30 pm   

On Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:46:57 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid>
wrote:


We do 60 mil character height when we have to. It's usually readable.
The board houses seem to have got better at it in the last year or
two.

John

Wed Sep 01, 2010 10:17 pm   

John Larkin wrote:

Just checked my last super-dense layout. 0.038" character height, my
layouter cringed a bit but it came out nicely readable. White on green.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Wed Sep 01, 2010 11:51 pm   

oparr_at_hotmail.com wrote:

The only thing that causes me trouble is when relatively fine text of
0.050" or less overlays copper traces. The "bumpy ride" of the traces
seems to make the silkscreen shoddy. I can't imagine any other board
houses can deal with this any better.

I've used 4pcb.com (Advanced Circuits) for years. Only a few problem
boards, and those were ones with no electrical test.



--
Good day!

____________________________________
Mr.CRC
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Thu Sep 02, 2010 1:36 pm   

On Sep 1, 2:30 pm, "op...@hotmail.com" <op...@hotmail.com> wrote:

That's funny -- I was just stuffing an AC board last night, and was
noticing the even etching, good registration, but the silkscreen
looked watered down, like they had over-thinned the ink. I had
noticed that kind of thing before, not all of the time, just every now
and then. (I send 20 designs/year to them). Maybe I'll mention it to
them.

-Jim MacA.

Thu Sep 02, 2010 2:05 pm   

"Jim MacArthur" <macarthur_at_physics.harvard.edu> wrote in message
news:37088549-7727-4063-9ea4-16caa5f4c0fb_at_i13g2000yqd.googlegroups.com...

Can you post here too please. Then I can have something to compare my bad
suppliers with. Ta.

Thu Sep 02, 2010 3:28 pm   

A particularly bad board came in yesterday. I'll send a pic along to
Advanced Circuits, and see if we can't get to the bottom of this.
Thanks for bringing this up; it's been simmering on my back burner for
months.

Thu Sep 02, 2010 9:45 pm   

On Sep 2, 9:05 am, "Grumps" <gru...@nothere.com> wrote:


Not sure how to post to this group, but I put the image onto my lab's
OWL site:

https://www.seas.harvard.edu/eshop/index.php?login=1

Log in as user/user and browse to the "Misc" folder. There's only one
image in there at the moment. Click on the "JPG" icon to the left of
the file name to view.

This is about the worst that I've seen from AC. Entire characters are
missing. If this had been a production board, I would have sent it
back, but it's a prototype, so I let it slide. The rest of the
processing is up to AC standards. The characters are 60 mils, with 10
mil line widths, which usually works fine. In fact, a previous run of
this same board had flawless silkscreen work.

-Jim

Sat Sep 04, 2010 2:14 am   

On Sep 2, 2:45 pm, Jim MacArthur <macart...@physics.harvard.edu>
wrote:


Geez, that's the worst silk screening I've ever seen. What also
compounds my gripe with them is that they dropped 8 panels (16 boards
per panel) from my last order, destroying 8 boards. They just marked a
big "X" on them with a marker and said nothing. They won't be getting
anymore business from me.