Pure Fluid Magic - 1997 Excellence Award Winner

Creating a production product line of Surface-Mount Emulator Adapters for the electronics industry

During the last year, a need arose for a Surface-Mount Emulator Adapter product line. In the past, these parts were machined from expensive and hard-to-work thermosetting plastics. The parts were difficult-to-machine designs limited, mind you, by state-of-the-art machining practices.

Our adapters have vertical and horizontal slots of .012 in (+/- 0.0003) spaced at 0.0194. In addition, two pieces, a top and a bottom, must be made in order to hold the many contact pins precise alignment. Machine costs and lead times were out of control. In October of 1997, Fujipoly released Sarcon Thermal Gap Filler, in essence, a "rubber" heat sink. Why not try SLA parts filled with this special gel and try to solder them? Not only did they solder well, they lasted fifteen minutes in a 500°F oven. The contact pins discolored and the emulator adapter became unsoldered from its PC board, but the adapter material did not melt. Thus, it passed the test and a new product line is off and running.

We can now manufacture a product of better design, in one-tenth of the time for half of the cost. Not to mention an additional assembly time savings of fifty percent utilizing our loading fixtures, also made by stereolithography. This is a precision-production product line that could be machined -- but stereolithography is faster, less expensive, and superior.