We’re excited to share some news from the production floor: we’re installing a new Ersa ECOSELECT 1 selective soldering machine here at Electrica, our electronic design and manufacturing facility in Manchester.
It’s a step that’s all about flexibility, not headcount. As our project pipeline grows more varied, we want production to be able to handle everything from small, special series work through to our bigger runs.
Why we’re investing now
If you’ve worked with us before, you’ll know our circuit board design team is consistently busy. Projects come in, ideas take shape, and the pace rarely lets up. Production is a different story. It ebbs and flows, largely driven by component availability and by the mix of standard and special-series projects. A delivery delay here, a batch arriving early there, and suddenly you’ve got a week where everything lands at once. As an electronics manufacturing service (EMS) provider, that’s a rhythm we know well, and one we’re always looking to plan ahead for.
That’s exactly the kind of flexibility the ECOSELECT 1 is built for.
It’s a compact, batch-type selective soldering system, and its standout feature is flexibility. Using proven Ersa selective soldering technology, it fits into less than 3m² of floor space, and its dual solder pot lets us switch between two solder alloys, or nozzle diameters, without the downtime of a full pot change.
What this means for you
Whatever the shape of the week, from a single special-series board to a batch of standard runs — which happens more often than any of us would like — this machine means we can move straight from one customer’s project to the next without yours slipping down the queue.
In practice, that’s:
- Consistent quality, whatever the project. From small, special-series boards to demanding multi-layer or heavy-mass assemblies, full-area preheating and precise control of the solder wave keep quality consistent.
- Faster changeovers between projects. Our CAD Assistant software builds new solder programs directly from CAD files or scanned PCB images, so we can move from one customer’s project to the next with minimal set-up time.
- Full traceability. An integrated process recorder and solder protocol document every solder wave height, temperature and level to ZVEI standards, giving you the paperwork to back up the quality.
Investing in the team, not instead of it
We’ve always believed that our people are what set us apart: their expertise, their judgement, and their commitment to getting things right. The ECOSELECT 1 doesn’t change that. It takes the repetitive, precision soldering work off their plate on our more complex and special-series projects, freeing them up to focus on the parts of the job that need real skill and attention: quality checks, problem-solving, and the finer detail work that machines simply can’t do.
It’s an investment in keeping pace with our own circuit board design capability, and in making sure that whatever the size or complexity of your project, you can still rely on us to deliver your printed circuit boards on time.
If you’d like to know more about how this fits into your project, or want to see the new machine in action, get in touch, we’d love to show you around.
