Hansatech invests in Europlacer pick-and-place

Hansatech, based in Poole, Dorset, UK, uses 20,000 sq. ft. of production area and employs 100 people. “We have an excellent team at Hansatech and they have done a superb job of getting as much from our production equipment as was possible,” said Hansatech’s Managing Director Paul Gill on the acquisition. "However with PCBs becoming much more densely packed with increasingly smaller and smaller devices, it became abundantly clear that we needed to make an investment in new a pick-and-place system”. According to a release by the company, Hansatech changed machine supplier due to the requirement for quick setup and changeovers coupled with high technology. “We considered several machine vendors, all of whom offer great equipment. But after extensive tests with various machine types, we finally selected Europlacer as our partner going forward,” said Technical Manager Rex Waygood Waygood. “Europlacer is based in Poole, which of course helps guarantee better service levels than some of the other suppliers, but this was not the key factor. During our trials, Europlacer proved to our team that it offers a very flexible and high-technology system in the iineo platform — this flexibility and technology was the driving factor for our business.” Hansatech invested in a Europlacer iineo-II machine with a value of approximately £400,000. The system is equipped with two turret heads capable of running at speeds up to 28,000 components per hour, and can hold up to 264 x 8 mm fully intelligent feeders. It can handle devices from 01005 up to 70 x 70 mm and as tall as 35 mm in height.