For over 30 years, Huddersfield based Electroparts have been serving the contract electronics manufacturing market, producing high quality PCB assemblies using both Surface Mount and Through-Hole technology.

Early in 2022, it was highlighted that a new oven was required in order to maintain their consistently high quality standards. Jake Mellor, Engineering Team Leader and Malcolm Longley, Project Manager SMT/PCBA Specialist, went out to the market to evaluate a number of suitable reflow systems.

The key features that were required, listed as follows:

• Good number of upper and lower zones
• Compact footprint
• Build Quality
• Power Consumption

3 oven suppliers were shortlisted, the TSM TRA I-f82S finally being selected after extensive trials.

Jake Mellor explains the main reasons for the choice “with 8 upper and 8 lower zones in a compact footprint of 2.19 metres, we found that we had excellent control of the temperature gradient that PCB’s would experience, regardless of the type of materials from the vast range that we run”

Jake continues “the level of detail and build quality was far superior to that of the other competitive machines we evaluated and the power consumption values are superb – we expect to be saving in the order of £16k over the next 4 years”

Malcolm Longley added “communication with Europlacer throughout the evaluation process has been excellent, Ben Sweeney – Sales Engineer, guided us through the process while we contacted local users of TSM to ensure they had received good performance and support. It’s always encouraging to hear great feedback from existing users”