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Old 09-02-2008, 12:52 AM
Grant Stockly Grant Stockly is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 447
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Once upon a time, 2 years ago, I bought a batch of 10 1k memory boards. They were the first boards that I'd ever had made with a solder mask and silk screen, so I was very nervous. These boards did NOT have gold fingers and they turned out GREAT!

On the second batch of PCBs I decided to add gold plating to the fingers and a beveled edge to the card edge. I created a "mask" to go over the area that I wanted to be exposed to gold. This mask was larger than it needed to be, but it didn't bother me since it hung over the edge of the PCB. The tops of the fingers on the boards without gold fingers are covered up with green solder mask.



They sent me $3500 worth of PCBs in that first order, and about $3000 of them were wrong. All of the boards looked like the top board in the above picture, some worse. They thought that the entire gold finger should be exposed, so they bumped my mask up. Since my mask was too large, it made the board look bad. They also modified the solder mask/silk screen in quite a few areas.

Because of this costly error on their part, they set it up so that they would send me a check plot on every order before it went to manufacturing. This is basically them e-mailing me my gerber files back to myself. I don't understand why they need this process, as far as I'm concerned they should just stop editing my files!

When I went to reorder the PCBs, they assured me that they would be using the latest batch of engineering files, but they didn't. They used the old files, and modified them AGAIN...

The reason I want to reorder the PCBs from the same part number is I want to save $200 or so in "engineering" fees. Regardless of saving money, there is also no guarantee that a new part number wouldn't be edited either...

The thing that surprises me is that the CPU card (shown above) had the bad gold fingers AND at least one area of modified silkscreen. The bad gold finger area was actually in the check plot that they e-mailed me, but NOT the silkscreen modification! So what good are the check plots if they are going to modify the files further after sending them to me!

I may try to get them to discount the CPU boards because of the modification made after the check plots, but I'm doubting they will do it. I am at fault for not catching the gold finger issue.

I will let you guys know as soon as the new boards arrive. Every part of the kits are ready to ship. I would have taken pictures but I left my memory card at work!
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