Early in April we identified that there was a serious need to get one of our machines operational. This was our RPS Automation Rhythm Selective Soldering system.

If you’re not familiar with a selective soldering machine, it’s basically a machine that creates a small fountain of molten solder that is controlled by an X,Y,Z robotic platform. This platform is then programmed using software, to move to very specific locations on the circuit board and solder the bottom side of the board. Here’s a video of it in action.

It’s a great machine but we had trouble getting it to work for our needs. It was not soldering our boards very well. It was leaving all sorts of solder bridges that had to be reworked and even missing a lot of solder joints. It was causing a lot of headaches. So something had to he done. A couple phone calls to RPS and we had one of their finest representatives (Adam Zinnecker) in our shop giving us a full 3 days of training, at no charge. He flew out from Spokane Washington and didn’t seem to mind waking up at, what felt to him, 4AM.

We learned so much about the equipment as well as the process of selective soldering itself. Selective soldering is still very new in our industry and has a lot of uncharted waters. But after our training we were off and running. We learned all about how to care for the equipment. What sort of maintenance was essential and how to extend the life of wearable items. He went over dozens of techniques to help reduce defects and increase throughput. It was very comprehensive.

Thanks to Adam’s help and a bunch of effort we now have probably over 50 unique assemblies programmed on our machine. We have easily run 10-20 thousand circuit boards all together. We have put her through the paces.

Along the way we recognized that our 4″ mini wave was not going to be a good solution for us. Another quick couple of phone calls to RPS and we made an arrangement to send them back our 4″ mini wave solder pot and receive a gently used lead-free soldering pot. It could not have come at a better time. We received it on a Tuesday morning, put it in the machine, filled it with solder, calibrated it, and ran about 20 assemblies for our customer who came to visit us that afternoon to see it in action. It was an unbelievable day and everything just fell into place for us.

What makes selective soldering particularly unique is that you don’t have to worry what parts have already been assembled on the circuit board. Because the machine is programmed you can have it avoid coming into contact with components that would otherwise be damaged. So if you have a circuit board with very large connectors on both sides, no need to worry. Just program the machine to avoid those large connectors and just solder everything else. The following is a picture of an assembly that we make that has very large connectors on both sides. As you can see, there would be no way we could wave solder this circuit board. The only way you would ever have been able to assemble this circuit board before we bought this machine was by hand. It was very time consuming.

But with a selective soldering machine we can solder the large white connector and then go back and solder all of those other connectors on the opposite side. Notice there are a bunch of SMT parts on the side with the white connector too. All of those SMT parts would fall off the board if we tried to wave solder these.

The selective soldering machine has been a great success for us. We solder literally hundreds of circuit boards every day with it. The solder joints are far more consistent and repeatable than hand soldering. And the time it takes for us to solder each board has plummeted. Some products take far less than half the time they used to take us soldering them by hand. And it’s a great fit for our continual flow manufacturing operation. More on that in a later post.

Mass Suicide Threat at Foxconn

I wonder how well they’ll make your products.

Air Compressor

Wair compressore did a ton of research on the purchase of an air compressor. We had been using a very large reciprocating style air compressor. It had a 10HP motor and an 80 gallon tank. Our filtration system left much to be longed for and our dryer required almost daily maintenance to keep it working properly. It was being heavily taxed with two pick and place systems that drew an enormous amount of air through their venturis (not a type of wine aerator. A venturi is a really ingenious piece of equipment. Here’s a Wikipedia link describing how they work). This forced us to be able to use only one pick and place machine at a time, which as you can imagine, this limited our capacity quite a bit. On top of that, we wouldn’t be able to add any more equipment to our facility without possibly over taxing our current air compressor.

So we began doing a little research and discovered that there are at least two big players in the air compressor market. Ingersoll-Rand as well as Sullair. We contacted distributors for each manufacturer. Air Compressor Engineering (A.C.E.) out of Westfield, MA and A&M out of Uxbridge, MA. ACE carries Ingersoll-Rand and A&M carries Sullair. After doing a ton of research we found that both companies were going to fit the bill for us quite well. Their products were very similar and we had a difficult time finding much differentiation between either one. At the end of the day A&M had a slightly better price but Ingersoll-Rand’s footprint was slightly smaller. The footprint was important to us because right now we have a very limited amount of floor space. We explained our predicament to the salesmen at both companies and unfortunately for A&M there wasn’t much they could do about the footprint. But changing the price wasn’t too difficult for ACE. So at the end of the day we ended up purchasing a brand new air compressor from ACE, made by Ingersoll-Rand. And let me tell you, this is one beautiful piece of equipment.

We ordered a 10 HP rotary screw air compressor. (Link to IR’s product page). It comes mounted on top of an 80 gallon “receiver” (tank) and is enclosed in an acoustic enclosure. The machine is very quiet. You can easily and comfortably speak over the noise it makes when the door is closed (which should will always be closed). We did not purchase the variable speed version. The price of which was far too out of our price range. But the on-load/off-load is perfect for us. We went ahead and plumbed in our old air compressor as well. This way we have the extra storage space which improves the air compressor’s efficiency as well as allows us to perform maintenance on the IR air compressor and continue our manufacturing operation by running our old reciprocating air compressor.

ACE did an excellent job of delivering the machine on time. It came on an open bed truck so that we could easily use a fork lift to get it unloaded. Here’s a quick video I shot to remember that day.

Our friends across the street welded up two beautiful stands for each air compressor so now we can easily use a pallet jack or fork lift to move the air compressors around. It’s really handy.

One of our goals with this new air compressor was to never worry about the quality of our air ever. So we made the investment in a very high quality inline filter and dryer. The dryer we purchased is basically an air conditioner that cools the compressed air down as it passes through which causes the air to condensate so that the dryer can collect the moisture and remove it before it gets to our equipment. We purchased a cycling dryer so that we could save energy. Otherwise the dryer would be running 24/7.

In order to reduce how much maintenance was required for this system we also decided to purchase electronic drain valves for each air compressor. These drains turn on for about 10 seconds every 45 minutes, expelling any water in the tank. There are a total of 5 drains in our system. One for each tank, one for the compressor itself, one for the air filter, and one for the dryer. Each drain is plumbed into something called a “Polysep”. This is one sweet tool. Basically it uses centrifugal force and a very large filter to separate the oil from the water that gets expelled from the system. The water then fills up a small channel in the back with nothing but clean, sewer safe, water. From there we have a tube that runs down into a small 5 gallon bucket that we empty about once a week. It’s a really nice setup.

All of the tubes you see are how the water gets passed from the system to the Polysep. The Polysep is that small cylinder to see hanging on the wall. The flexible gray air hose you see underneath our new air compressor is connected to our old air compressor. This way if we ever need to move our old air compressor we can just unhook the air hose and move it around, without interrupting production.

This was a huge improvement for WAi. We’ve been really pleased with IR as well as ACE. Now we never worry about our air quality or consumption. We have enough to last us a very long time.

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A friend asked me the other day, “…given the sorry state of so much in the world, what’s possible to look forward to?”

The state isn’t sorry. It’s wide open.

Interest rates are super low, violence is close to an all time low, industries are being remade and there’s more leverage for the insurgent outsider than ever before in history.

This got me thinking. So many people are blaming their problems on the economy. Meanwhile thousands of very successful companies were formed during seriously bad economic times.

We could have kept watching cable news and kept worrying and deciding not to get that loan or invest in that machine or hire that young energetic guy. But we would have missed huge opportunities. Instead we’ve kept plowing forward. We’ve made immense positive changes and have completely reinvented what kind of company WAi is. Later I will post a series of articles outlining all of the changes WAi has gone through for 2011 and how they have impacted us. We see the chance of a lifetime.

There’s a podcast I listened to while running today, in tribute to Steve Jobs. It was rather moving. About a dozen people waxing poetic about how much of an influence Steve has had on their life. One of the speakers, and a favorite writer of mine spoke about the human aspect of everything that Apple does. And it really hit home for me what I’ve been desperately trying to articulate to friends and family. I’m trying to, myself, find the best way to explain why I love Apple products so much. This often confuses people. People smirk and snicker sometimes, and I got plenty of sarcastic people telling me “sorry about your loss” as if there’s no reason to feel emotion of his passing. But I’ve come to love Apple products so much and, like I said, I’ve had a difficult time of explaining why. I think finally, with his passing, a lot of reflection, and listening to this podcast, I think it has all finally clicked for me.

The human aspect

Anybody can put a piece of hardware and software together for a bullet point test (those ridiculous lists that try to compare one product or another to an Apple product) and “win”. Specs do not, never have and never will, tell the whole story. Steve Jobs, and as a byproduct Apple Computer, care most about how a person is going to use his product. That’s why you have apps like Photo booth. I was at an Apple Store a couple of weeks ago waiting to get my iPhone repaired. While I waited I decided it would be a good opportunity to observe people in the store. I love watching people, not in a creepy way, but in a way to learn about them. As I watched people most every single person in the store was in some way smiling, interacting, or even laughing while they used Apple’s products. One group in particular was about four or five teenage girls. They all ran up to one of the iMacs, one girl pawed at the trackpad for a second, and just a few seconds later they were all laughing their heads off and making ridiculous faces at the iMac. Obviously they were playing with Photo Booth. I sat their and smiled and kept watching out of the corner of my eye, so as not to make them uncomfortable. But they wouldn’t have even noticed anyway. They wouldn’t even have noticed if Tom Cruise himself was watching them. They were so engrossed in this experience and having so much fun with this computer, they forgot completely that it was a piece of technology that they were using. They didn’t care about how much ram it had or how fast the cores ran, or whether or not it had an LED backlit display. No, they were enjoying themselves, having a human experience, laughing hysterically and loving every moment of this. They were saving pictures and uploading them to their friends and family to share in this experience and to laugh together. The human aspect.

I think Steve would have been very pleased with what I saw that day. He knew what mattered. He knew that you can’t just make a photo app (I’m looking at you Office Picture Manager ugh) he had to make a great photo app. One that people loved using and were excited to take pictures just to be able to use this app. But not so that they could sit their and build an indexible library, but so that a mother and father can click on their daughter’s face and see all of their pictures of their daughter and see it in a beautiful timeline to enjoy and cry and cherish the memories. It was so a husband and wife could sit together and put their favorite pictures from their anniversary vacation together and build a printed book that they could put on their coffee table to read and enjoy and fall back into the thoughts and memories of what a good time they had together. The human aspect.

Steve was adamant when developing the first iPhone that it ran at 60 frames per second. Do you ever see that on a spec sheet? Of course not. It’s too abstract to measure. So why was it so important to Steve. It’s because of the human aspect. He knew that he wanted to create something that people love to use. And if a person touched their phone and it jerked and stuttered when all the person wanted to do was get to their camera app so they could take a picture of their son as he was rounding home plate from his first t-ball game, they would curse the phone and repeat the oft heard phrase among Windows users “I hate computers.” The typical human experience.

Steve saw what technology could be. He only cared about speeds and feeds as much as it mattered to the human experience of using his product. You’ll see this reflected in a lot of the decisions Apple makes that the tech pundits don’t understand. A tech pundit will tell you that the iPhone is inferior to Android phone XYZ because it doesn’t have 4G. If you told that to an Apple employee it would go in one ear and out the other. That’s because Steve has instilled in his employees and is company that the human aspect is more important. An Apple employee would tell you that people could care less that their phone has 4G when it dies after 3 hours of use. The human aspect.

The next time you shop for a piece of technology, or any product really, pay attention to the human aspect. At the end of the day you’ll be very happy you did.

Seth makes some great points here. In particular he mentions my greatest pet peeve with most businesses (and products for that matter).

Too often, it’s just being phoned in. Rather than reach out and try, they do just the bare minimum to “make the numbers”. When you fully develop to team that’s in it to nock it out of the park you get APPL. Argue all you want about whether or not Apple makes the best products on the market, but at the end of the day they’re still the most valuable company in the world.

It’s really about caring. First care (follow that link. You won’t regret it). Really at the end of the day, Apple does care. They really care about creating a great experience for their customers. That’s pretty much it. They don’t care about the latest and greatest technology. They don’t care about 4G or 3D or any other gimmicky fad that’s happening right now. They care about creating an amazing experience for their customers.

WAi is no different. We really do care about creating a great experience for our customers. We push ourselves every freaking day to do all that we can for our customers. Not just in making a product and getting it out the door, but constantly refining and improving every aspect of our manufacturing and fulfillment process. If we delivered your product in 5 days last month, we want to deliver it in 4 days this month and in 3 days next month. The status quo is not good enough!

Interesting piece by Mike Buetow over at Hot Wires. Sounds like China’s beginning to taste the sweet nectar of letting corporations take care of their people instead of the government taking care of the people. There’s apparently a new round of fees levied by China on MNCs doing business in China. Apparently this has caused hundreds of businesses to go under already with thousands more poised to go under as well.

Don’t you just love having your manufacturing operation in the Wild Wild East. Now believe me, I personally feel that globalization in the long run is a good thing. It will be beneficial for humanity as a whole. But at the end of the day, if you’re trying to find a good supplier to make your product or sub-assemblies, do you really want to have to think about and manage these types of things? You are in the states, your customers are in the states, why not have your products manufactured in the states. Deal with an operation that’s easy to get along with and speakers your language, both figuratively and literally. It’s not anti-globalization, it’s just good business.

Here’s a feel good story for your weekend. Sleek Audio, maker of customizable earphones, recently moved most of their manufacturing back to the United States from China. I like the phrase they use “reshoring”. Fortune has the article so click the link to learn more.

I’m seeing more and more of this. OEM’s are getting fed up with the hassles of dealing with a factory many many miles away. Even with the flattening of the world, it’s still difficult for a relatively small company to manage their manufacturing operation when they are so far away. And even then, who are you dealing with at your contract manufacturer. Probably the fabled “account manager”, who speaks the English language, but doesn’t communicate all that well, and can’t even get you answers because the rest of the group won’t be in until 2AM your time. Give me a break!

We need next generation manufacturers. Companies that will step up and compete and offer you real service. When you call Worthington Assembly, you get Neil Scanlon, the company’s president. Something tells me your “account manager” won’t be able to help you quite as well.

Some brilliant writing from the guy who originally named the “iMac“, Ken Segall. He points out some very interesting things about how Apple does business. For instance…

 

 

I had the pleasure of working on the “Making Of” video for the Cube, which appeared on apple.com when the store was first opened. That video called out the extraordinary effort that went into procuring the quality components necessary to create this store: the stone flooring from Sicily, the stainless steel surfaces from Tokyo, and the glass staircase and cube structure from Germany.

Apple doesn’t expect a single visitor to the Fifth Avenue Cube to think much about the floor they’re walking on. What they’re trying to do is create an overall feeling — that this is a place where people care about design and quality.

Apple’s message to customers is loud and clear. They repeat it often. They want to make products that they would absolutely love to use themselves. They really care about what they build and how it’s perceived. So they go to great lengths to make sure their customers perceive it the same way they do.

Are you getting the message across to your customers that you really care about what you’re doing? What is your Italian stone and Japanese stainless steel? Do you have a cohesive message you’re sending with everything you do?