Radial leads moulded, tested and taped
before the inserter ever asks for them

The station that sets your line rate is usually the one nobody has a cycle time for.

Body text is kept in English on every language version by design: these are technical articles, and a machine-translated technical article is worse than an English one.

Ask a production manager for the cycle time of a THT line and you will get a competent answer about insertion, wave soldering and test. Ask for the time it takes to hand-form and hand-tape the radial parts that feed it and the conversation changes shape. Nobody measured it, because it never appeared as a station on the line layout. It appeared as headcount.

That is the whole problem. Hand taping does not fail loudly. It absorbs whatever volume you throw at it by absorbing more people, and because the cost is spread across wages rather than capital it never shows up as a number anybody has to defend. The line rate is therefore set by a bench, and the bench is invisible in every report you have.

The way to make it visible is a three-line calculation. Take the number of radial components on one board, multiply by the boards you build in a month, and divide by the taping rate of one person. That gives you person-months. Multiply by the fully loaded monthly cost of that person - not the wage, the wage plus the contributions, the supervision and the space - and you have the annual cost of a station that does not appear on your layout.

Then do the same division at 180 components a minute and subtract. What is left is the labour the machine releases, and it is usually the smallest number in the comparison. The larger numbers are the ones the bench hides: the reels you bought because you could not tape fast enough, the rework on boards where a lead pitch was formed to the wrong gauge, and the warranty claims on reversed electrolytics that passed every check you ran in-house.

The reason this matters beyond the first year is that the calculation repeats. Component counts per board go up as designs add decoupling and bulk capacitance. Volumes move up and down with demand. Every time either changes, a bench absorbs it by hiring, and a machine absorbs it by running. One of those two scales and the other one accumulates.

If you want the arithmetic done with your own numbers rather than a generic example, the calculator on this page takes the component count, the board volume, the taping rate and the wage, and returns the hours released and the payback period. It is worth five minutes before the next headcount review, if only to find out whether the bench is as cheap as it feels.

Why a reversed electrolytic capacitor passes every simple check you run in-house.

Body text is kept in English on every language version by design: these are technical articles, and a machine-translated technical article is worse than an English one.

Here is a failure that passes your end-of-line test, passes your functional test, passes a visual inspection under a lamp, and then splits its case open in a customer's enclosure six weeks after shipping. A radial electrolytic capacitor inserted with the polarity reversed will survive a surprising amount of testing before it dies, because the electrical continuity is perfect right up until the electrolyte vents.

The reason it survives is that a simple continuity or presence check cannot see polarity. It sees a component in a hole with two leads soldered. To see polarity you need a measurement that distinguishes anode from cathode, and that measurement has to happen before the part is committed - not after it is soldered into a board you cannot un-build.

There are two places to put that measurement. The first is at the inserter, and it is expensive: an insertion machine that verifies polarity is a more complex machine, and by the time the part reaches it the cost of the tape has already been paid. The second is at the taping machine, one step earlier, where a reversed part can still be turned rather than rejected.

That second option is the one worth designing for. A taping machine with a polarity station measures each part, and if the orientation is wrong for the tape being built, a re-orientation station rotates the part instead of throwing it away. Both directions are selectable, so the tape can be built positive-lead-first or negative-lead-first to match what the inserter expects. The consequence is that the failure mode is removed rather than detected.

The part that makes it durable is that the check happens on 100 percent of parts, at a rate of 180 a minute, without a person making a judgement. A human sorting by eye does the same job well for the first hour and less well after that, and the parts that slip through in hour nine are the ones that come back in month three. Consistency is the whole value of putting the check in the machine.

If you are currently sorting polarity by hand, the first useful thing to do is measure how often it goes wrong - put a counter on it for a week. If the answer is never, you have a good process and this is not your problem. If the answer is not never, the cost of that failure is already in your warranty numbers, and it is worth comparing it against putting the check one step earlier.

Diameter, body height, lead diameter and lead length decide the machine, not the model number.

Body text is kept in English on every language version by design: these are technical articles, and a machine-translated technical article is worse than an English one.

The most expensive mistake in buying a taping machine is buying it by model number. Two machines with the same name and the same published speed can be unable to run the same component, because the parts that decide it - the bowl tooling, the track eyes, the spreader and the moulding die - are all cut for a specific body.

So the sizing conversation is a drawing conversation, not a catalogue conversation. Five numbers decide almost everything: body diameter, body height, lead diameter, lead length and the body shape. A 10 mm round electrolytic and a 10 mm square MKT of the same nominal diameter need different bowls, because a bowl that orients one will jam on the other.

Start with diameter, because it selects the fixture set. The published configuration covers Ф6 to Ф10 mm as standard, and the product sheet separately describes a conventional range of Ф4 to Ф10 mm in which Ф4-Ф6 share one fixture set and Ф8-Ф10 share another. If your component mix straddles both bands, you need both sets, and it is cheaper to order them with the machine than to discover it at the first changeover.

Then lead length, because it selects the forming die and the trim station. The machine handles product lengths of 5 to 30 mm and standard formed pitches of 2.5, 3.5 and 5.0 mm, with 7.5, 10, 15 mm and above to order. Parts with leads longer than the standard range are trimmed at the cutting station before taping, which is what keeps the finished tape height uniform rather than varying with whatever came out of the bag.

The number people forget is the tape specification. Taping height, hole pitch, hole diameter, paper width and thickness, top tape width and polarity direction are all set on the machine, and they are all things your inserter has an opinion about. Agreeing them in writing before the die is cut is what turns a machine purchase into a tooling project with a known end date.

The practical version of all this: send a component drawing and a physical sample, and ask for a written configuration that names the die, the fixture sets, the bowl tooling and the tape parameters. If the answer is a model number and a price, ask again - the parts that decide whether the machine works for you are not on the model number.

Six numbers on a tape drawing that decide whether the inserter picks or mis-picks.

Body text is kept in English on every language version by design: these are technical articles, and a machine-translated technical article is worse than an English one.

A tape is a mechanical interface, and like every mechanical interface it has a tolerance. The number that catches people out is not the one on the tape drawing - it is the one that is missing from it, because the inserter's pick height and the taping machine's taping height have to agree and nobody wrote either of them down.

The visible failure is a mis-pick rate that creeps up. The inserter starts missing parts, or picks them at an angle, or clinches a lead that is not fully in the hole. The line blames the inserter. The inserter supplier blames the tape. Somebody measures a tape, finds the taping height is a millimetre off, and the argument ends - three weeks and a lot of goodwill later.

There are six numbers that decide whether a tape works. The sprocket hole pitch and diameter locate the tape against the feed wheel. The taping height sets where the component body sits relative to the hole. The paper width and thickness set how the tape behaves through the feed path. The top tape width sets the retention force that holds the leads down. And the polarity direction decides which way round every part arrives. Get those six agreed and the tape becomes a specification instead of a hope.

This is where building the tape in-house pays off in a way that is easy to miss. When you buy pre-taped components, those six numbers are decided by somebody else, and your only lever is to reject a batch and wait for another one. When you tape in-house, they are parameters on your machine that you can change, measure and freeze - and you can hold the measured first article as the reference for every tape you build afterwards.

That reference tape is the quiet part of the method. Tape one full strip, measure all six numbers, sign the measurement and keep the strip. Every subsequent batch is compared against a physical object rather than a memory. When something drifts - a punch wearing, a pressure roller flattening, a heater losing temperature - you find it by comparison instead of by a mis-pick rate three weeks downstream.

Before you order anything, get your inserter's tape specification in writing, or ask us for the blank form and fill it in with your process engineer. It takes an hour, it costs nothing, and it is the single document that decides whether the machine you buy is a working asset or an argument.

The arithmetic that turns a grinding tolerance into a defect rate.

Body text is kept in English on every language version by design: these are technical articles, and a machine-translated technical article is worse than an English one.

0.01 mm sounds like a marketing number until you multiply it by 180 a minute. Then it becomes an arithmetic question: how many parts does a cam set touch in a year, and what does a fraction of a millimetre of accumulated error do to the parts it touches?

At 180 components a minute, a machine running two shifts touches roughly 170,000 parts a day. The cam set is what converts a continuous motor rotation into the discrete motions of forming, indexing and punching, and every one of those motions lands on a part. A cam ground to 0.01 mm holds its timing. A cam ground to a looser tolerance, or a cam that wears into a looser tolerance, starts closing the die a fraction early - not on every part, on the thousandth part, which is the worst possible failure rate because it survives your sampling.

The failure it produces is not a dramatic one. It is a lead formed to 2.48 mm instead of 2.50 mm, which still goes into the tape and still goes into the inserter and still goes into the hole, until it does not. Then you have a defect rate that nobody can reproduce on demand and a forming station that everybody suspects but nobody can prove wrong.

This is the argument for an imported cam set ground to 0.01 mm, and it is also the argument against a mechanical clutch. The clutch is the assembly that slips under load, wears at the engagement faces and eventually seizes - and when it slips, it does so intermittently, which puts a random timing error into the same station that the cam tolerance was there to protect. Replacing the clutch with a servo control system removes the largest source of intermittent timing error on the machine.

The practical consequence for the buyer is that these two features should be checked together, not separately. A precision cam set behind a slipping clutch is money spent and thrown away. A servo drive in front of a loose cam set is a fast machine with a variable output. What you want is both, and both are stated on the S-300B product sheet: servo control replacing the traditional clutch, and imported cams with a grinding accuracy of 0.01 mm.

The way to test the claim on your own parts is to measure a formed lead from the first hour of a shift and another from the ninth, and compare them with a micrometer rather than a go/no-go gauge. If they agree, the timing is holding. If they do not, you have found the defect source before it found your customer.

Three assemblies fail before the frame does, and all three are replaceable by design.

Body text is kept in English on every language version by design: these are technical articles, and a machine-translated technical article is worse than an English one.

A taping machine does not die of old age. It dies of three specific assemblies, in a predictable order, and every one of them is replaceable. Knowing which three tells you whether a fifteen-year service life is a claim or a plan.

The first to go is the drive. On a conventional machine that means the clutch, which is a wearing assembly by design - it engages by friction, so it wears by definition, and the wear is progressive and intermittent. The symptom is a machine that starts missing index positions, then starts forming leads inconsistently, then stops. A servo control system replaces that entire failure mode rather than managing it.

The second is the punch and the pressure roller - the parts that touch the tape. They are consumables on any taping machine regardless of make, and the reason they matter is not their cost but their availability. A machine that needs a punch you cannot buy is a machine that is down for however long it takes to have one made. The supplier manual for this machine class lists the punch, the roller, the tape guides, the eyes and the heater as the consumable set, which means they can be stocked rather than improvised.

The third is the cam set, and this is where the fifteen-year figure is actually decided. Cams wear slowly, and a worn cam does not stop the machine - it degrades it, by a fraction of a millimetre, until the forming tolerance is outside the window and the defect rate becomes visible. The published figure is imported cams ground to 0.01 mm, which sets both the starting accuracy and the working life of the station.

What makes the difference between a machine that lasts fifteen years and one that is replaced in six is therefore not the frame. It is whether the wearing parts are designed to be replaced, whether the supplier still sells them, and whether the machine has a maintenance card that tells you when to look. A machine with a documented consumable list and a lubrication and inspection schedule will outlast a heavier machine with neither.

The concrete thing to ask for is the maintenance card and the consumable list, before you buy - not after. If a supplier cannot tell you which parts wear and where to get them, the fifteen-year figure is about the cabinet, not about the machine. On this class of machine the card covers lubrication points, the cam inspection interval and the eye inspection interval, and it takes an hour a month to keep.

Where the money in hand taping really sits, and how to put a number on it.

Body text is kept in English on every language version by design: these are technical articles, and a machine-translated technical article is worse than an English one.

The price of a taped component is not the price of the tape. Tape is cheap - paper, adhesive and a sprocket hole. What you are buying when you buy a pre-taped part is somebody else's labour, somebody else's yield loss, somebody else's floor space and somebody else's margin, and none of those appear on the line item.

So the useful question is not what a taped part costs, it is what taping costs you today. And the answer has four parts. There is the labour: the people standing at the bench, at their fully loaded cost, for the hours they are there. There is the material: the reels you buy because you could not tape fast enough, which carry their own price and their own lead time. There is the yield: the parts damaged in hand-forming, and the boards that come back because a polarity error got through. And there is the space: a bench, a bin store and a staging area that are not making anything else.

Three of those four can be measured directly. Labour is a headcount and a wage. Material is an invoice. Space is a rent figure per square metre. Yield is harder, and it is the one that usually decides the case - because a reversed electrolytic that reaches a customer costs the return, the freight, the investigation and the goodwill, and it never appears in a taping cost analysis until somebody adds it up.

The method that makes the case defensible is to compute labour and material first, because those numbers are uncontroversial and they set a floor. If the labour released alone pays the machine back inside a period your finance team accepts, the argument is over and the yield improvement is a bonus. If it does not, the yield and warranty numbers have to carry the rest, and those need evidence rather than an estimate - which is why counting polarity failures for a week before the purchase is worth more than any savings model.

What makes this calculation stay true is that it is built on inputs you control and can revise. Component count per board changes. Volume changes. Wage rates change. A model built in a spreadsheet with your own numbers can be re-run every year, and the answer will move honestly with the business. A model built on a supplier's assumed saving cannot, which is why the calculator on this page takes your figures and asserts nothing of its own.

Put the four numbers in and read the payback period. If it is inside your capital threshold on labour alone, the decision is straightforward. If it is not, you now know exactly how much of the case rests on the yield argument - which is the honest position to walk into a budget meeting with.

The verification routine that makes in-house taping an improvement rather than a risk.

Body text is kept in English on every language version by design: these are technical articles, and a machine-translated technical article is worse than an English one.

Bringing taping in-house is a quality decision disguised as a cost decision. The saving is real, but it only materialises if the tape you build in-house is at least as consistent as the tape you were buying - and consistency is a routine, not a machine.

The failure pattern is well known. A plant buys a taping machine, runs it well for three months, and then the mis-pick rate on the inserter starts to drift. Nobody can find a defect, because there is no defect - there is a slow change. A punch has worn by a few hundredths. A pressure roller has flattened. The heater is running slightly cooler and the adhesive is holding slightly less. Individually none of these is out of specification. Together they produce a tape that is subtly different from the tape that worked.

The routine that prevents it is a first-article comparison, and it has three parts. First, after commissioning, build one full tape and measure every parameter on it: formed pitch, taping height, hole positions, polarity direction, lead retention. Second, keep that tape and its measurement sheet as the reference, physically, in a bag with a date on it. Third, on a fixed interval - monthly is usually enough - build another tape and measure it the same way, against the reference rather than against the specification.

The difference between measuring against the reference and measuring against the specification is the whole point. Specification limits are wide enough to let a machine drift from one edge to the other without ever being out of tolerance, and it is that drift, not a violation, that changes the inserter's behaviour. A physical reference tape catches drift at the point where it starts.

What makes this durable is that the maintenance card and the reference tape reinforce each other. The card tells you when to look at the cams and the eyes; the reference tape tells you what the machine looked like when it was right. A plant with both has a process it can defend. A plant with neither has a machine and an opinion.

If you are about to bring taping in-house, the cheapest thing you can do is decide the measurement routine before the machine arrives: who measures, how often, with what, and where the reference tape is kept. It takes an afternoon to write down, and it is the difference between an improvement you can prove and one you can only assert.