Your PCB assembly line has been working fine for a number of years, but suddenly you’re noticing a drop in quality or output. Maybe you walk in one day to find an essential unit completely dead. How do you know whether it’s time to repair or replace your SMT equipment? At Capital Equipment Exchange, we’ve put together some factors to help you decide.
Failures or interruptions can happen anywhere along your SMT manufacturing line. After all, complete production setup involves many types of precision machines all working together in top condition.
Maintenance is step one in making sure your SMT machines last and continuously work the way you want them to. Think about the number of functions they complete day-after-day. Thousands upon thousands of high-precision processes put your equipment under a lot of stress. Eventually, repairs will be needed to keep even well-maintained equipment running smoothly efficiently. It’s important to know what to look out for.
Eventually, all the wear and tear will add up, and it will be time to replace SMT equipment with new or used PCB manufacturing machines. Popular pick and place machines, screen printers, and reflow ovens will usually have a strong community of knowledgeable fans and easy-to-source repair parts. Once your model is truly obsolete, no longer responds to regular maintenance and repair, or experiences a fatal outage, it may be more beneficial to replace the unit.
At Capital Equipment Exchange, we regularly make high-quality replacement parts available for situations where repairs are possible. When that isn’t the case, we encourage you to explore the affordability of used SMT equipment. You may be able to source the same model you’re used to or even upgrade to a newer model by the same brand you’ve come to trust. If you don’t see what you want in our inventory, make sure to drop us a line. We may have what you need on the way or be able to recommend wallet-friendly options that will work even better for you.