Jaltek Systems are delighted to announce that we have recently made a significant capital investment to up-grade our capabilities with the purchase of two complete new assembly lines.

The equipment, with a value close to £1.5million, will be supplied by Blakell Europlacer and comprises of two lines. Both lines have a Speedprint stencil printer, TSM reflow, Eunil conveyors and a Europlacer iineo I. The second line also has an additional iineo II. The first is due for installation in February and the second will follow shortly after.

Jaltek’s Managing Director Steve Pittom commented on the investment saying; “As our business continues to grow we needed to increase our capacity and expand our capabilities to meet the increasing demands and requirements of our current and future customers.”

A team of engineers were assembled to look at a number of potential vendors, including the two incumbents – Jaltek’s key requirements were flexibility, technology and service support.

Steve Pittom continued; ”The easy option for us would have been to stay with our current suppliers, but our engineering team were tasked with evaluating their offering as well as looking into potential new vendors of manufacturing equipment”.

Following extensive throughput calculations, customer reference visits and specification comparisons, the team came to the conclusion that the best solution for Jaltek’s current and future manufacturing plans was the Europlacer iineo platform.

Andy Bottomley, Production Engineering Manager and Neil Stanton, Quality Manager, both part of the Evaluation Team, agreed that; “there were a number of unique features of the iineo machine that we found really interesting. Some of these benefits include the fact that the iineo can hold up to 264 x 8mm feeders,  handle boards up to 1m in length and each machine can assemble PCBs with devices as small as 01005 and up to 50x50mm, including up to 34mm in height”.

“Blakell Europlacer is a well established supplier of pick and place equipment and stencil printers” said Derek Williams, Jaltek’s Operations Director, “and they have a solid reputation for successfully supplying many complete line solutions within the UK. We decided to look into this further, and following some reference site visits where we saw whole line installations, we took the decision to allow Blakell to bid for the 2 complete lines.”

The 2 lines will give Jaltek a theoretical capacity of around 70,000 components per hour, but more importantly gives total compatibility between the ‘prototyping’ line and the main production line. “Prototypes will be fine tuned on the iineo I line” stated Derek Williams “and can then be seamlessly transferred to the main production line. As the programs and feeders are 100% compatible – this will offer our customers a secure means of product development to full production”.

Jaltek’s Chairman, Pravin Sood had the final word on the investment; “We’re delighted to be working with Blakell Europlacer and benefitting from their world class technology, solutions and service.”