Pick & Place Assembly SM Line at Hanover Displays

SIGN OF THE TIMES One of the largest installations of Blundell equipment in the past year has been at Hanover Displays in Lewes, Sussex. Hanover manufactures passenger information systems for buses, trains and fixed installations. Their moving LED displays are seen on many public service vehicles and they export worldwide. Transport For London recently awarded a big contract to Hanover for 13,000 signs over an 18 month period. Steve Aplin, their manufacturing manager was charged with increasing production capacity by over 30% within a very short space of time. An investment of around £1 million was approved to upgrade their building and install new production equipment. To boost capacity, Hanover installed a line of three iPulse SMT placement machines, two M2’s and one M4. With the help of Blundell engineers they created a fixed feeder set-up for their standard range of boards. Feeders are mounted on plug-in trolleys, so there is virtually no changeover time between standard PCB’s types. The placement machines are linked together with a Nutek smeema conveyor and reflow is using an Ersa Hotflow 2/14 convection reflow oven with 12 heating and 2 cooling zones. “The Hotflow oven is very economical as well as providing us with an incredibly controllable heating profile” says Steve Aplin. “We needed a big oven to handle the output from 3 placement machines, and the Hotflow copes extremely well” he adds. Some of Hanover’s LED module boards have through hole solder joints on both sides. The Ersa Versaflow was chosen for selective soldering of these PCB’s. These boards were previously hand soldered, taking up to 20 minutes each. Now, the Versaflow solders them automatically in just 3 minutes. Another advantage of the Versaflow was that the solder flows very well up the holes. The thickness of the boards made it difficult to get good hole filling when hand soldering. Wave soldering is still an important part of Hanover’s production operation and they have 3 Blundell CMS 400 wave soldering machine, all of them lead free compatible. Two of the machines were bought new last year, the other one is a few years old, and was converted to lead free recently by Blundell engineers. “We didn’t have any problems with the change to lead free” says Steve Aplin, the changeover was quite straightforward”. Steve Aplin concludes “We have bought equipment from Blundell for a number of years and have always been very happy with the service. We like their way of doing business, it matches ours, so when it came to spending half a million pounds on new production equipment, we felt very confident giving that business to Blundell”.

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