#320 – An Interview with Brent of OSHstencils

Brent Of Oshstencils: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded October 20th, 2016. Episode 320. An interview with Brent of Osh Stenzels.

Chris Gammell: Welcome to The Amp Hour. I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics. And I'm Brent from Osh Stenzels. Welcome, Brent. I think a lot of people listening to this will know your service because you basically allow for small pitch parts to actually get soldered. So thanks for that. Yeah, absolutely. So tell me a little bit about yourself. So like I said, most people I think listening who are doing small pitch parts recognize the need for stencils. They recognize the need to be using Reflow and stuff like that. But how did you get started in this whole thing?

Dave Jones: Where did Osh Stenzel come from? It's kind of a funny story. I mean, Osh Stenzels is actually not my first business. It's my third that I've done over the years throughout my career. And all of my businesses have followed sort of the same pattern and theme.

Chris Gammell: I would really love to hear if it was like, oh, this is Osh Thruhole parts and Osh...

Dave Jones: No, no, unfortunately, it's not that exciting. But typically, you know, they start out of personal need and often frustration. You know, I see that...

Chris Gammell: Scratching your own itch and stuff like that, right?

Dave Jones: Yep, exactly. You know, I mean, I have a need for something and I do a bunch of research and try and see if there's something out there that, you know, satisfies my requirement. And if I can't find something or something doesn't meet sort of the level of quality or what my expectation is, then I investigate on whether or not it's worth starting something to fill that need. And that's pretty much exactly how Osh Stenzel started.

Chris Gammell: That's great. And what year did it actually start working? Because I think you and I met in person, at least, at the Open Hardware Summit back in Boston, which was, what, 2013? Correct. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And in fact, we had actually just launched, you know, literally a matter of weeks before that summit. And it was my opportunity to sort of go out and meet the community and start, you know, giving some awareness to what we do. And it essentially started, you know, I was sitting down one night and, you know, my background is not in electronics per se as a career. You know, I've worked in technology pretty much for the last 20 years and sort of the software and network and data center and Internet space. But I do build electronics projects on the side. You know, it's a hobby of mine. And I was working on this Bluetooth project for an automotive project that I was working on. And I had realized, you know, I spun the board a couple of times because I need to make some revisions. And I realized that my entire…

Chris Gammell: That doesn't happen. Come on. Are we all going to write the first time, right? That's right. We're all perfectionists, right? You're going to write out the gate. Right. I've only ever done one rev of any board I've done. That's right. Even with a breadboard. Yeah, right. That's right.

Dave Jones: Even with a breadboard, you still mess it up, right? And that was exactly the scenario. You know, I was on my third revision for a board. And I was sitting down and I was looking at it. And I had to order, you know, a stencil because it was a surface mount board. And I had been using one of my competitors for some time. And I thought to myself, this is so frustrating. You know, my entire board project, including the boards and all the components and three revisions in, the whole project was about $40. And I had realized that by ordering this third stencil, I would have spent $120-something in stencils. And I was like, this just doesn't make any sense. You know, I'm spending $30 on the project and $100 on stencils. And there's got to be a better way. And that's how the idea came about to start off stencils.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So, well, maybe I should give some of my background, too, then. I actually didn't start really even using. I mean, I use stencils at work and stuff like that. But usually I was doing, like, I was applying solder either with, like, so we've had Jonathan on. I've used the Pico paste press. That was a little bit later. But I'd use one of those, like, hydraulic, you know, foot pedal paste dispensers where you're just dabbing out solder paste, like, a little bit at a time. But I really didn't get into it much later. When you were ordering those, were those capped on stencils or were those stainless or what?

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, yeah, at the time, I was actually ordering them from O'Hara, who was, you know, had been doing it for about seven years. And Ryan's a great guy. Oh, yeah, Ryan's been on the show, too.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, awesome. He's a great guy. You know, I met him at the summit. And we've actually forged a pretty good friendship over the years. And, you know, it's been really great. But, yeah, I used to order them from him.

Chris Gammell: So those were capped on, though?

Dave Jones: Yep. Okay. Yep. And ironically, that particular project was my first dabbling into reflow, right? And so I didn't even have a history of doing reflow. And so that's why sort of the light bulb came on was because I realized as a first-time reflower that this cost just didn't make a lot of sense to me for a hobby project. And so I started investigating, you know, alternatives.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Okay. Well, that's good. I mean, and that's how it happens, too, right? Especially when you start getting into projects with, like I said at the top of the show, like the smaller and smaller pitch, it really becomes more critical. You know, even with the dabbing, the paste on kind of stuff, that can get pretty tedious pretty fast.

Dave Jones: Yep. Absolutely. And, you know, the project that I was working on, the idea was it was going to be a product that I was building for another company. It was more of an experiment. And then if the experiment worked, they actually were going to turn it into a commercial product. And so it was really important for me for the prototype to look very professional, right? Which is why I did it in reflow as opposed to surface mount.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. Had you ever done, like, the – because it's so, like – and what I'm really trying to get at is, like, I've known other people that have done it, you know, further back and further back, right? Kind of thinking about how traditional stencils were done. A lot of times they're actually machined, right? I mean, they're actually – you have a milling machine that's cutting out a piece of stainless steel that has these, you know, the small – maybe you should explain what a stencil is, even. Maybe that's a good starting point as well.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So a stencil is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. You know, when you're growing up as a kid and you're trying to draw letters on a wall, right? Sometimes you would use a stencil to get the letters just right and line up just right and have them be consistent. It's kind of the same principle for electronics, right? I mean, the idea is that you want to create a mask between the board and essentially your solder paste so that when you're applying the solder paste to the board, it's only going onto the areas that you want it, of course, which is the copper landing pads for your project. And so it's just to make it a really clean application. Apply the right amount of solder paste to the board that's needed or necessary for your project. And it just makes the whole process, you know, clean and super smooth and very professional. And, you know, it's essentially to have to not deal with the dabbing it and getting the right amount. I mean, all the inconsistencies, right, is to give you a clean, smooth experience. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I always think, yeah, I think about repeatable as well because a lot of times the only time people would ever be getting a stencil made is if they're in higher volume production. They need to be able to, you know, it's interesting too because I always talk about this with chips, right? So this is basically the photolithography process of soldering boards, right, where you're basically exposing, quote unquote, areas of the board to solder paste instead of light. And, you know, like basically you're only putting paste in these certain areas. That's the same thing like photolithography, you're removing, you know, resist from certain areas of the board. But the difference being that you're doing it all at once, right? It's like a single shot exposure for an entire board versus or an entire panel even of multiple boards versus, you know, if you are just dabbing it on one pad at a time or there's a lot of there's also those printers out there that actually inkjet paste on one pad at a time. And rastering back and forth across the board, that gets really lengthy in terms of time investment for each individual board or panel, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. And so the idea is that, you know, you have one process that you can repeat over and over again. You know, obviously it's great for assembly and manufacturing, especially in higher volumes. And a lot of people think of the stenciling process as circuit boards, at least that I've heard in the past, right? You think of it like silk screening a t-shirt, right? Yeah, that's a great thing.

Chris Gammell: Yep, exactly.

Dave Jones: You know, exactly. So you have three colors and each color, you know, gets applied and you ultimately end up with your design and you're restricting the color based on that design. It's the exact same concept.

Chris Gammell: Not to be confused with silk screen on a board, though. Correct, correct. So common terms. Yeah, yeah. No, that is a good example as well. So when you got started into this, it was Kapton stencils as well. What is the usual thickness of Kapton? So when I, I've done this a bunch of times now, but so like when I use a Kapton stencil, how much paste is, when I drag paste across a stencil, there's a little gap. And now if paste falls into there and I scrape across there, what is that usual height of the actual Kapton? What's the thickness of a stencil?

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, it really depends on the application. For Kapton, the most common thicknesses are three mil, which is three thousandths of an inch, or five mil, which is obviously five thousandths of an inch. And those are the two most common sizes. And ironically, the most common for stainless steel is four mil. And I imagine that the reason why that we don't supply four mil Kapton is because it's actually not easy. It's not a common thickness for manufacturers. So if you were to go and try and buy Kapton from a supplier, three mil and five mil are the options, which is why I imagine most people select that.

Chris Gammell: Right. That's what you get off the reel or the big roll of Kapton, right? I mean, like that's... Exactly. Yeah. Hmm. That's interesting. And yeah, mil, not millimeter. It seems even weirder for like a physical, like a thickness to hear. Like, you know, I'm used to it with boards. Like, oh, yeah, you know, 30 mils, 20 mils, whatever. But thickness of a sheet, I would never expect to be in thousands of an inch. I don't know why.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. And of course, you know, a lot of the Kapton and polyimide, you know, which is also referred to as polyimide. Kapton is actually a brand that's owned by DuPont, right? The actual material is polyimide. And that's a very common material. It's also used for, you know, insulation inside of electronics, which most people know. But, you know, the irony there is that when we were trying to source suppliers, we actually went through several manufacturers to get the material. And there are a lot of variances. And of course, there's onshore suppliers and offshore suppliers. And we definitely went through probably about eight or nine of them when we were trying to source the material. And, yeah, of course, everything over there, especially overseas, is all in metric, right? So we had to do all the conversion and figure out the exact thing that we needed so that it would be, you know, common to the PCB industry and what people would recognize as far as thicknesses for stencils. Because most stencils are talked about in mils versus millimeters. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Thanks, Imperial. That's so great. So, and what is, do you give a choice for three or five?

Dave Jones: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when the user is going through the process, you can do three mil or five mil. We originally launched the service with just three mil back in July of 2013 when we officially went live. And then we got a lot of feedback right away that folks wanted thicker material for larger components, things like MOSFETs and power amplifiers and things that had large copper surface area. So they wanted a thicker material. And at the time, we had sort of architected our solution around a highly automated process, which was really focused around feeding into the machine with one material. So shortly after launch, I sat down and going, okay, well, you know, how do we meet the needs of the customers, right? So I went and sort of went through the same iterative process, you know, got some five mil material. We ran a whole bunch of tests and then figured out, well, how can we modify our proprietary loading system that we designed to handle two materials, right? Because we didn't really forward think that one too well. So we went back to the drawing board and re-engineered a whole concoction and came up with a new way of feeding the material into the machine. And then we launched five mil. And it was a great success. You know, people really were receptive to it. But, you know, three mil is still, from a captain perspective, is still the most popular thickness. And it's about a 70-30 split. About 70% of our customers choose three mil over five mil.

Chris Gammell: Okay. That's cool. And I guess, I mean, like, it's pretty square on where, like, so if I have a five mil based stencil, then I will get about five mil of solder paste, right, if I'm scraping properly across and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Correct. And application is key. This is one of the things that we often get asked is, you know, how do I actually do this? How do I apply solder paste with a stencil? How much pressure do I use? What angle do I use? All right.

Chris Gammell: Well, let's paint a little audio picture here, Brent. Right. Right. So what is the best way to put paste onto a stencil onto a board? Because I still suck at it, to be honest.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a good question, you know. And so I really think that there's, you know, there's two audiences, right? You sort of have the assembly line and manufacturing audience, which uses printing machines and, you know, squeegees that are automated and apply the same amount of pressure and the right angle and whatnot. And then, of course, you have the majority of our customer base, which is people that are prototyping or doing home hobby projects or whatever it may be. And so it's a completely different thing, right? It's not an exact science. It's everybody. It's a learning curve. Everybody has to go through it. It's like riding a bike. You do it a few times and you mess it up. And then once you start getting your rhythm down, then it becomes, you know, second nature and you can rip through boards like it's no tomorrow. And so one of the common things that we see is that people use very low quality paste and that has a major implication on the results of their reflow. And so it's really important that you select a quality paste because the viscosity of the paste and the chemical compound of the paste is really important to get, you know, the paste release to come off the stencil just right and to get your final result. And so this is an experimentation thing, right? This is something that each user is going to have to do based on the pace that they have. But what we often tell people is think of it like, you know, if you're taking your squeegee or in our case, a little plastic spreader that we include.

Chris Gammell: And it's like a credit card.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it's sort of like, you know, it's really good for prototyping and small projects. Most people use credit cards, but we include it, you know, as part of an order and, you know, it works out great. And so if you think of it, you know, putting that card at roughly a 30 to 40 degree angle and as you're applying the paste, the idea is that with a good quality paste, you'll see the paste roll sort of like dough rolling. If you're if you're, you know, putting pressure against it. And the idea is you want it to sort of create sort of like an ocean wave effect is a good way of thinking about it. You know, when the ocean goes up and it curls and it starts to curl upon itself. That's essentially if you have a good quality paste and you're applying the right amount of pressure, you should start to see the paste sort of roll like that.

Chris Gammell: And the idea is that it's like not sticking to the not sticking to the actual cap on or not sticking to the plastic. Is that why? Exactly.

Dave Jones: Right. Exactly. And so, you know, solder paste changes viscosity when it's when it's being applied and when it's called shearing. Right. And so as you're applying the paste, the viscosity on good quality paste will get thinner so that it's easier to spread. And then once you're done with the shearing, it'll actually get firmer and it'll settle. And that's that's the result you want, because that creates, you know, the tack or the or the sticky feeling that you can then land your components on. And so you don't want to try and put your components on a on a really liquidy paste. And so the best rule of thumb is to, you know, apply the smallest amount of pressure possible to where you can equally distribute paste across the stencil in one pass. And if you can do that, then you're going to have fantastic results every time.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. OK. Well, that sounds nice and easy, but I don't think I'm there yet. Definitely takes practice. Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned good quality paste. What is what is your paste of choice and source of choice? Because that's actually what I usually run into is like I find a lot of sources and but then it's like five gallon bucket. Yeah. It's like I'm not buying a five gallon bucket.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's a common. That was another common question we have is, you know, how come we didn't offer paste? You know, which we do now for the record, but we didn't for the first three years. And there was some reasoning behind that, which I can go into. But our our paste of choice has always been Kester products. You know, they've they've been they're a well-known brand, well-known and recognized in the industry. They have a wide array of paste selections. And and it's actually the paste that we that we carry ourselves. And it's we just had good results. You know, all the projects that we first started with, we've always just been using Kester. And we've tried Chip Quick and a couple of other brands and they work equally as well. But, you know, we've always just been fans of Kester. And so that's that's what we use.

Chris Gammell: I didn't realize you guys are selling that stuff now. Where do I where do I find it on your site?

Dave Jones: So it's actually part of the checkout process. So when you when you finish your putting your stencil on the cart, as you go on to the next page before you do your payment, there's a there's an add ons area where you can add a little jigs, little acrylic jigs to hold your board in place and also lead and lead free solder paste. We stock now.

Chris Gammell: I gotcha. Yeah. OK. So, yeah, that's good. Good segue, too. So I did notice I've ordered a couple of the jigs as well. Basically, it's like a right angle plastic thing, kind of at the thickness of like it's like close to 62 mils. So it's nice and in level of most most board types. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. It is, you know, one sixteenth of an inch because, of course, it's imperial, which is just slightly lower than a one point six millimeter board, which is, you know, probably the most common circuit board size. Which, you know, a funny story behind that is that with Kapton, it's not really an issue because the Kapton, you know, flexes and bends. And so you don't really notice that that really small difference. But on stainless steel, which we launched in June, it's a different animal because stainless steel one obviously is metal, but it's truly flat. So metal. Yeah. Yeah, of course. So so it's truly flat. So as you start to apply the paste, once you sort of hit the jig to the board, you can sort of feel that minor little, you know, divot in the metal as you as you go over that little threshold. And so we got some feedback about that, which we which we completely just, you know, didn't think about when we when we launched stainless because we've been using, you know, Captain for so long. So we're actually investigating a supplier to give us one point six millimeter acrylic. So hopefully soon we'll be swapping the one sixteenth jigs to actually be one point six. So that won't be an issue anymore. That's good. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know. I well, like I said, I'm still I still struggle with doing it even after all these different times of trying it. And yeah, I don't know. I don't know if there's anything better I could be doing other than practicing more.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it is. It is definitely an acquired skill.

Chris Gammell: And, you know, you know, you should make here's here's here's my suggestion, because one of the other things that I have problems with is like or, you know, maybe someone listening could make it is OK. So I put down this. So, like I said, it's a right angle. It looks like a it's like laser cut plastic acrylic right angle, kind of like a square. And that works fine. But then I usually put down the stencil and then I tape it. But the problem always seems to be that I when I untape it and I like peel it back because I only take untape one side at a time. It's always the peel back that I end up smudging smudging all the all the different the different pads with paste on and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's a that's actually a really good point. So one of the common issues that that customers have is that they tape down the stencil on multiple sides. And that's actually in most cases not a good idea. We found through experience and through feedback and obviously there's tons of videos on the Internet. You can see that the best way to do it is just tape the stencil down on one side and typically from the side that you're going to start pasting from. So, for example, if you're going to if you're going to paste from the top of your board, right, tape the stencil at the top of the board and then hold that side with your thumb and then take the paste and apply pressure one direction away from the tape. And that'll give you a much, much better result.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah, because professional stencils often not not saying yours are professional. Large scale stencils, large scale stainless stencils. Those are always mounted in like frames to write where they're. They're pulled super taut and they're right. I mean that the normal method.

Dave Jones: Correct. Yeah. So, yeah, exactly. They're typically done in frames and there's a couple of common sizes, you know, used for most fab houses. OK. 23 by 23 and 29 by 29. And there's a couple of different frame sizes, too. There's tubular and slim. Slim meaning that the frame is about a half an inch and a tubular frame is about one and a half inches. Oh, yeah, that's exactly it. They're pulled extremely tight. Right. So that way you, you know, the stencil is going to line up perfectly every time they go into a fixed mount so that when the board slides in, you know, through the manufacturing process, when the when the stencil comes down, it lands in the same spot every time and you get a consistent result. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So what I was going to say is that we should someone listening or you guys should get like a little almost like a what does it look like? Like a lever thing, you know, that lowers it down and then brings it back up. There's like jigs that do that kind of thing for what am I thinking of, though? It's almost like a like a press. Yeah. Like a press kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think like a juicer, maybe. I don't know what I'm thinking of. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't want to juice the solder paste juicer. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's a weird one. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Another thing that we've seen, which is really interesting, especially in the sort of the hobby and do it yourself market, is there are a couple of companies out there that make they look almost like a like a giant breadboard. And they have these pegs that you can line up. And then and then what you do is you you know, you the the breadboard sort of looking thing, you know, obviously the peg holes are all the same equal spacing. So the idea is then what you can do is you can create those cutouts on your stencil. Right. And then set your board in between, you know, the four pegs and then just drop the stencil down on the four pegs because you had them cut out and it'll line up every time. And so we've seen a couple of people submit designs that that have those peg holes mark on their stencil for us to cut out. So that's a pretty a pretty cool little inexpensive solution.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's a cool idea. No, I definitely like that. And yeah, I mean, it's kind of weird because it's like, you know, when I think about especially with the Capton stuff, I usually don't think about those as like super. I mean, like usually my my response to myself of like, oh, I should really standardize this. It's like, well, this is meant for like two or three boards at a time. You know, like I'm going to order boards from Oshpark. I get three boards. I get a stencil and it's like, all right, well, I'll keep that stuff, but I'm not really going to need it all. I'm not going to need it again because I'm probably changing the design or whatever.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And that was that was kind of the idea, right, is that we wanted to sort of make it convenient for people at a price point that didn't break the bank. And we wanted it to be disposable, right? You use it for your three boards that you order and you're done.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, I still haven't learned my lesson on that one, too. I usually only make I order three and make one or make two. And, you know, I should always make three.

Dave Jones: But, you know, what's interesting is we've actually seen people do 300 boards off a single Captain stencil from us.

Chris Gammell: I was going to ask about that, too. OK, so that's that's kind of the going record.

Dave Jones: It is. You know, we've had a couple of people in the 200s that have that have gone back to us. But we have one guy that's done over 300 boards on a single stencil. And he even 3D printed his own little custom Captain stencil holder, like his own little jig. And it's almost like you said, it was almost like a press that just like would flip up and he would put the board in and you'd flip it down. It would line up perfectly. And it was pretty cool. And so, yeah, as long as you take proper care with it and you don't you don't put too much pressure and tear it, they'll actually last quite a while.

Chris Gammell: So what is do you do you guys spec a timeline on how long they should last or recommend it at least?

Dave Jones: You know, we're pretty conservative because obviously we know that a lot of folks are new to this. And the most common issue that we hear is people just put too much pressure, which ironically doesn't damage the stencil, but it puts too much paste on the board. And so it's just an education process. But, yeah, we were pretty conservative. We typically say, you know, if you're going to use a polyamide stencil, you know, 25 uses to maybe 50 at most is all we really recommend. And or else, you know, the plastic is going to start to break down. And as you put pressure, it's going to wear down, unlike stainless, of course, which you can do thousands of without seeing any issues.

Chris Gammell: Right. So you start to see like especially with I guess it depends on feature size, too. Right. If you had usually it's probably not as much the size of the of the hole so much as how close how much bridge there is to the next hole. Right.

Dave Jones: Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, you know, at the end of the day, it is a very thin plastic. And so it is susceptible to to, you know, tearing. And when you have extremely fine pitch components, if you're going over that, you know, repeatedly, that little teeny piece of plastic between your your pins is definitely, you know, susceptible to being damaged or broken if you're not careful.

Chris Gammell: And what is the lower limit? I mean, I haven't looked at the site in a couple a couple of weeks, but like what what is the lower limit on what you can actually do? Can you do like five mil spacing or what is the limit there?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So that's actually a great question. And this has probably been one of the most surprising things that customers have given us feedback on over the years is that they're they're blown away at how small of a cut we can actually make on captain and and have a successful print. So the minimum feature size is it has to be at least five mils in in all directions. Right. So you may not have to have a minimum of a five mil by five mil pad in order for it to cut through. And a lot of that just has to just has to do with the way that the laser reacts to the plastic. Right. Is that if you don't have a feature at least five mil by five mil, the plastic will actually melt back on top of itself. And so and so you don't effectively cut through it and you're just left with, you know, a solid piece of plastic. So it has to be at least that big in order to get all the way through the material and actually create an opening that pace can get through. And of course, we recommend obviously five mil is extremely small and we don't recommend that for for, you know, fine applications. But people do it all the time, you know, especially for really fine pitch BGAs. We have guys that have done some pretty amazing stuff with BGAs using our captain product. And a lot of them have switched to stainless steel now because it's just a much more precise product than captain. But yeah, we're blown away at what some of the stuff people have done with with our plastic stencils.

Chris Gammell: And so you said it's laser based. What is I mean, so what kind of laser are you using for that kind of thing?

Dave Jones: Yeah, good question. So all of our polyimide stuff is cut using a CO2 laser. The actual machine is is a I would say a variant of a commercial product. So we've actually gone through four CO2 lasers from when we started the business. And back when we started, it was one of those things where, hey, how can we do this? Oh, we'll just go buy a hobby laser. Right. And we'll throw this on the first time, right? Right, exactly. So, you know, it was what was the barrier of entry for cost and how could we provide a solution? And so, you know, at the time, we didn't know a whole lot about lasers. We just knew that we wanted to come up with a way to do this. And so, yeah, we went and bought a hobby laser. And then, of course, it evolved from there. We realized very quickly that the hobby laser was not going to work for what we wanted. And we had to go to a more industrial grade. So our actual first laser that we launched the business with, we actually launched the business with the hobby laser. And then a week into it, we went, oops. Oh, wow. That's fast? Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Wow. Okay.

Dave Jones: A week into it, we realized this was a really bad idea. This isn't working out how we expected. And so, in a rather bit of a panic on a Saturday, I called an epilogue rep and drove two and a half hours and actually bought their floor model because the lead time to get one from the manufacturer was about eight weeks. And we didn't want to wait. And our hobby laser literally exploded on our desk. Oh, my God. And so, we hit a massive panic. We're a week into the business. You know, Adafruit and Maker picked us up and did articles on us on the first week of launch. So, we had this massive influx of traffic the first week and our laser just literally blew up on our desk. And so, we're, you know, mass panic. And so, I drove two and a half hours and bought a floor model that had about 10 hours of use on it from the actual epilogue rep. And that was actually the laser that carried us, you know, well into our first year was an Epilogue Mini 24. And it was a fantastic laser. You know, we loved that product. Great driver support. The company is great to work with. Their customer service was amazing. And so, we had really, really good luck with that laser.

Chris Gammell: I mean, that's what a lot of people know that name. That's used. The epilogues are used in all the fab labs, I think. And those are very, I mean, they're at a lot of different shows. And I think it's branched out into more. Like, I know the full spectrums come on the scene and there's other, you know, other brands that are out there that I don't know the names of. But, yeah, that's a very standard name. So, that's great that worked out.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it was. It was an experience. And then we sort of, you know, fortunately, then we got into a cycle of growth and volume was growing faster than we could keep up with new machines. And so, we realized that demand was there. And so, we were in a situation where the epilogue, we just, we couldn't literally get through the orders in a day because it just couldn't keep up with the volume. So, we ordered another machine, a bigger machine. And it was about a 12-week lead time to get it. So, for those 12 weeks were probably the most painful in our company history because it was a lot of late nights and a lot of early mornings just to keep up with the order volume on a very small machine. And then, yeah, and then, you know, when the new machine showed up, we had already outgrown it. And so, we were right in the exact same cycle where, yeah, where the volume in that three months of the new machine arriving continued to grow. And the new machine showed up and we were right in the same spot.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but at least you get the old one and the new one. And then, yeah. Then you can order the next one. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But then it was just an issue of, you know, typical small business story, right? Then it's a capital issue. As the machines get bigger, they get a lot more expensive. And so, we hemorrhaged a little bit for about a six-month period and had a lot of sleepless nights. But we maintained our 24-hour turn time, which is something that we've done since the beginning. And it was an experience, I'll tell you that. But it was awesome. We learned a whole lot in the way and we had a good time doing it. And we've made a lot of really good friends in the community through the process.

Chris Gammell: Well, you keep saying we. Who is this we? I didn't realize. I thought it was just you. It is. So, the business was. It's me, but I have multiple personalities.

Dave Jones: Right. No, no. So, the business was. It was me. It was a one-man show. Then my wife was helping out. Your family business. Yep. That makes sense. Well, it was more of, you know, hey, I still have my full-time job at an actual company. And so, you know, we started Osh Stencils. It was sort of a how do we give back to the community type company. Right. And then it ended up, you know, taking, you know, one hour a day turned into two hours a day, three, four, and so on and so forth. And so, my wife jumped into the fray and, you know, was helping with packaging and shipping and things like that while I was handling all the laser work. And then as the business grew and, you know, obviously the customer base grew in 2000, late 2014, we actually hired an employee to come in and sort of help with the operations. Yeah. So, now it's my wife is out of the scene and, you know, she's back to being a mom and I actually have an employee who does the majority of the operations. And then, of course, I handle the site and the business and the customer service and all that type of stuff. So, it's just the two of us.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Well, that's still good though. I mean, that's a measure of growth. So, that's awesome. Yep. So, when you were getting started too, because, okay, so my reference point for all this, the software stuff, I mean, people can go to dashstencil.com and, is it stencils or stencil?

Dave Jones: Stencil? Stencils, plural. Stencils, plural. Yep.

Chris Gammell: They can upload their Gerbers and stuff like that, but it's automated now. It seems a little bit more automated than it used to be, but also we talked to, when Lane was on the show many months ago, he talked about the bundling as well. So, how much at the beginning was you manually bundling stuff together? Or was it like you had regular, like you had like cutouts of Captain that you just kind of cut into that?

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's actually a great question. And it's actually good that you mentioned Lane, because there's actually a little bit of a story about how we got our name, and I'll tell you about that in a minute. Okay. But we're fortunate. You know, Osh Park, you know, they have to deal with all of the layers of the board and the drills and all the nuances of all the different EDA packages. Fortunately, in the stencil world, we only care about one and or maybe two layers, right? Which is the top and bottom. Right. Because you can't stencil the middle, right? So, we're actually great.

Chris Gammell: I'm going to try. I'll tell you that.

Dave Jones: That's right. So, we're actually really lucky is that we didn't have to deal with all the drill files and all that type of stuff, because it's not applicable for a stencil, right? You would just have a paste layer. It's a single layer. And it's pretty straightforward. Now, that said, you know, there are, of course, there are nuances with the Gerber file format. Every EDA package seems to interpret it slightly different, even though it's technically a standard.

Chris Gammell: A loose standard, yeah.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Open to interpretation standard is really a good way of putting it.

Chris Gammell: How about written in the 70s standard?

Dave Jones: Right, right. Where some people take a square and draw it as, you know, four lines and others take it as a triangle and flip it and mirror it and do all sorts of stuff. And you see all these really weird things. That's terrible. Yeah. Fortunately, we were able to leverage the Gerb V tool set early on throughout the business.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's the, what's based on Jita, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's an open source package. You know, just the Gerb V Gerber viewer. Yeah. And at the time, and in fact, I still think Oshpark still uses this, uses part of Gerb V today. But yeah, I mean, it was, I actually reached out to Lane before I started the business and I said, hey, I got this idea. You know, I want to start this stencil thing. It'd be a great compliment to the boards. Do you want to do something together? And he was super excited. He's been very supportive of us. He's like, yeah, that's fantastic. I would love to do something like that. I would love to have, you know, offer boards and stencils at the same time. So that's actually how we got the name is the idea is originally we were going to be sort of like your site to Oshpark. And so I did all of this development work and the original website looked exactly like Oshpark. It was all orange. And we went and registered the domain and, you know, Lane was heavily involved and we were communicating frequently. And then right before launching, he had the opportunity to pick up batch PCB, right?

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah, that's when SparkFun shut down on that batch PCB stuff, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. And so when that happened, all of a sudden he got into a situation where he had to make the decision between do I keep working my day job or do I really give everything I have to Oshpark? Right. And so he ended up moving forward with batch PCB as everybody knows and, um, and ended up, you know, going full time with Oshpark and his world became more complex as far as time. And so what we ended up getting into a bit of a, um, sort of a delay and launching the site because, um, because he got so consumed with the batch PCB acquisition that I just ended up reaching out. We kind of got a little impatient, uh, to be quite blunt. And, um, and I said, Hey, you know, this has been an awesome thing and really want to launch because, you know, the market needs it and the maker community is really growing rapidly and we want to definitely grow with it. Um, so are you okay if we actually just launch independently of Oshpark? And, uh, and I said, even though we're, we have a name that's very similar. And of course he was completely on board. He loved the idea. I said, yeah, definitely go ahead and launch it. Um, you know, supported us a hundred percent every step of the way.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I maintain Lane is one of the nicest peoples in the, uh, in the entire electronics community.

Dave Jones: So, oh yeah, he's fantastic. Um, and we love working with him. And so, um, so we, then I got into this basically situation where I was like, well, if I'm not going to technically launch and, you know, in parallel with him, I need to change the site, right? I need to have the site be unique because we're going to stand on our own. And so it was literally a, a, a, a sort of a frenzy of like four nights of up late and drinking too much soda to basically try and re rebrand the site to be sort of its own thing. And we did, and we launched it, uh, and it looked very, very different than Oshpark. And it was, it was great. And, you know, he's used the site and, uh, we have a fantastic relationship. And I, you know, like you said, he is definitely one of the nicest guys in the community and we've had nothing but good experience with him every step of the way. And even though there are a lot of people that confuse our businesses and think we are the same company, we are actually separate companies. Um, we do do a lot of work together. We do share a lot of the same customer base. Uh, and we often exchange files. You know, he has customers that sends panels over to us. Um, so we do, we do interact frequently, but yeah, it's, it's been great. And we've had a really good time. So you do panels as well, but not in Capstone. Yeah, no, believe it or not, we do them in Capstone. Um, really? Yeah. So we have, uh, a lot of, uh, Kickstarter projects. There are a lot of, um, attendee projects today where they do eight, 12, you know, 15 boards on a panel and use a captain stencil to do it. You know, these are guys that are literally, you know, hand building these boards, you know, 10 at a time or 12 at a time. So, and yeah, no, we have a lot of guys that do it surprisingly. And now most of those guys that are churning out, you know, a couple hundred boards, you know, every few weeks because, because they sell them commercially, um, they have switched over to stainless just because it's a more durable product. Um, but yeah, I have guys have been doing captain on full panels. Wow.

Chris Gammell: That seems like that would be not as great.

Dave Jones: Uh, but yeah, captain definitely has its, uh, you know, it's, it's really great for prototyping. It's really great for the home user. It's great for small boards and small projects. Um, but yeah, and, and larger volume, it can be tricky. And the reason why is, you know, polyimide is, um, when it's manufactured, it has a natural arc in it. And so it's not truly flat and that can be frustrating at times if you're trying to do board after board after board and the film will tend to curl. And so what we often, one of the most common customer service questions we get is how do I get rid of the curl and the, and the captain? And we say, oh, well you can counter roll it. So, um, you know, imagine it's like a poster, just roll it the opposite direction, put a little bit of pressure, you know, like rolling it on your desk, for example, and that will help take out the curl a little bit enough to use it. And of course the curl is going to come back because you can't truly get rid of it. Um, but at least it'll keep it flat enough for you to run through the paste application and then, uh, and then clean the stencil and store it for your next use.

Chris Gammell: Come on, man. You gotta be the salesperson and be like, and then buy another one and then buy another one.

Dave Jones: So, well, fortunately re-spins have plenty of customers coming back for more. So no issue there. Yes. My, my mistake is your profit.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Right. Exactly.

Dave Jones: But we wanted it to be an affordable profit.

Chris Gammell: So, so, okay. So, I mean, you've, you've, uh, you've alluded to the, the stainless. So what, what drove the stainless, um, to switch over to stainless then?

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's a great question. So we always wanted to do it. Um, but stainless is a totally different animal. Uh, the equipment cost to cut metal is, uh, about eight times more expensive than, than CO2. And so when you're talking machines that are, you know, 40 and $50,000, and then you throw an eight X number on there, all of a sudden it becomes a whole new ball game. Um, and that's exactly why we took so long to get into the stainless market. We are a small business. And, you know, if you've ordered a stencil from us, you know, that, you know, our stencils start at $5. So we got to sell a whole bunch of $5 stencils to try and pay for a $300,000 machine. So, um, so that's, that's what held us up is that, uh, what kind of machine is it?

Chris Gammell: I mean, so like, is it a different type of laser or what is, what is the, I actually, it's not milling, right? It's still a laser.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Great question. So yeah, it is a, it is a laser. It's a fiber-based laser. Um, and it's, it's made by LPKF. Uh, you know, we have their, their flagship model. One of the things that we learned, uh, through the captain experience in the previous, you know, two and a half years was we weren't going to make the same mistakes, uh, that we made there with a machine and then outgrowing it before, before we could even really get good use out of it. So we really did our homework on the stainless one. This is another reason why it took so long is I traveled around to several manufacturers, um, and tried to figure out how do I get the capital cost down? Cause you know, to be, to be frank, it was, it was a heavy pill to swallow. So, um, so I did a bunch of research and kind of like we did with CO2, we wanted to figure out, is there a way that we could do what we do, uh, on a less expensive machine? Uh, and what we found is that, uh, while there were solutions out there that were pretty good, they weren't good enough for the quality that we went after. And so we kind of had three philosophies when we started the company, right? We wanted the least expensive product possible, uh, for a domestic based product. We wanted our shipping time to remain, uh, 24 hours or less, um, and try and maintain that as, as best we could. Um, and we wanted the quality to be better than anybody out there that was trying to produce a similar product. Um, and those were our three sort of, you know, focus points. And we wanted to follow those same principles when we went to stainless steel and it's just a much, it's a much bigger, um, you know, gamble when it comes to investment. And so again, we didn't want to make the same mistake. So we did a bunch of research. We met with a lot of companies and one of the ways that we're able to hit the price points that we did was how we actually do the cutting. Um, and we have to leverage the economies of scale to do this. If we were doing framed stencils, there's no way we could offer stainless steel at the prices that we do. It would be literally impossible because the material costs are just too high. And so we had to come up with a better way to actually cut the metal. And that was one of the biggest challenges was finding a manufacturer that would be willing to modify the loading system to meet the needs that we needed to leverage the economies of scale to buy material at a price point that we could offer it inexpensively to consumers. And so, um, that's what we did.

Chris Gammell: Could you explain that some more? So you mean like, you mean like, uh, being able to bundle orders or something else?

Dave Jones: Um, so typically if you were to go and research a stencil cutting machine today, like an LPKF or some other machine, um, they all take frames, you know, and frame stencils is the most common application for stainless steel and they come in fixed sizes and the frames themselves material wise is about five X, um, the material cost if you buy it in sheets. And so the goal was, how do we figure out how to buy the material in sheets instead of frames to get it low enough to where we could actually sell it to the, you know, to the market at a price that people would be able to do it affordably. And so that was the challenge, right?

Chris Gammell: Does that mean because the, uh, because the LPKF cutters and all these other stainless cutters are based on frames? Like they expect that the input raw material to be frames. And so you have to basically trick it into thinking it's a frame, even if that is a sheet. Exactly. Is that kind of the idea?

Dave Jones: Exactly. That's exactly it. And so most of the machines, most of the lasers out there are designed to take frames. And now you can load a sheet in a, in, in a, uh, you know, basically a pneumatic frame, which basically simulates a frame, but that still wasn't good enough for what we needed, uh, because the sheet sizes were too small. And so the, again, back to the material costs, right? Stainless steel is significantly more expensive than, than captain. Um, and so we had to figure out how do we get a sheet size big enough to hit that tipping point to where we can offer it to the market at an affordable price. And that was the, really the challenge. So we actually had to come up with a custom way of loading material, um, and then processing material because the software is looking for a frame size and we were basically trying to trick it. Right. So, so we had to do a lot of little extra work to make it work. Um, and, and we did, and LPKF worked very closely with us to do that, uh, using their flagship model. They basically, you know, we modified it to sort of do what we needed to do as kind of a one-off. Um, and in order to do that, it took, you know, time, right. There was a lead time to get sort of that custom, that custom build. Um, but we've been very happy with it. You know, it worked out fantastic. We had to make a couple of adjustments, uh, you know, when the machine arrived, because some things weren't quite, uh, what we, what we expected, uh, when we actually started producing it in mass, um, because it's one of those things where you can't really test it beforehand. Cause it's a one, it's a custom design just for us. And so it was kind of like, you know, hopefully it works. We just spent all this money and hopefully it works. Um, and so we, we were very fortunate that, you know, we were about 98% there and we just had to make a couple of minor tweaks when it arrived. And, uh, and we've been off to the races ever since and churning out stainless. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So maybe we should mention the pricing here too. So I'm just looking at your, your site and you could switch between the, the polyamide and the stainless. And, uh, so it says 14 square inches. Our, our metric friends will have to excuse us here, but, uh, uh, 14 square inches, uh, a hundred, a dollar 28 per square inch. So that for one stencil, it's 17 for stainless and that's nine for, uh, polyamide. Correct. And so that's really not bad. I mean, like that's, yeah, that's not bad at all.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, um, yeah, you know, we, we did a lot of, uh, analytics on our customer base. And so, you know, we looked at what the average board sizes were over the last three years and what people were ordering and what volumes. And, you know, we also compared ourselves to a lot of the offshores, you know, one of the things that we constantly get challenged on is, you know, well, I can go and get, you know, a stainless steel in China for, you know, $25. That's absolutely true. But I encourage anybody to compare our stencil, uh, you know, uh, apples to apples to a Chinese stencil of the same design, uh, especially under a microscope. And I think you're going to see some pretty noticeable differences. We actually ordered several stencils from various stencil houses, both domestically and offshore. Uh, and this was one of the other reasons why we, we lean towards the LPKF is, uh, because they are definitely one of the, one of the world leaders in, uh, stencil cutting as far as machinery goes. And we wanted to make sure that we did it right. We wanted to maintain the quality. We didn't want to buy a second machine and go through that process again. So we, we made the investment and we came out with, you know, the top of the line machine with the top of the line stencil metal. We researched a ton of stencil metals to believe it or not. Um, there are a lot of them out there and they are not manufactured the same way. Uh, and so we utilize the, the number one, uh, stencil metal manufacturer in the world and the number one machine. And so we, it's a fantastic product, you know, we're really proud of it. And the goal was how do we get that product, um, into the hands of the maker community and try and do it at a price point where it's less than 20 bucks. And that was our goal. And, uh, so far, you know, it's, it's panned out and, you know, uh, you can, you can search and a lot of people are talking about it. And so far the response has been great. And so it's been, it's been a wild ride.

Chris Gammell: What is the China, uh, what is the differences like that you see? So like, so if I, if I was going to order a stencil from anywhere and I looked on it on a microscope, what should I, what should I be inspecting for?

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's a good question. So there's a couple of things, right? The metal makeup itself is, is different. They do use most of the offshore. I'm not going to say all of them, but most of the offshore vendors use inexpensive stainless steel. And so you're going to get, um, imperfections in the cut. It's not going to be as smooth. Um, you're going to look, if you look inside of the aperture, you're saying like in the

Chris Gammell: actual, like, if you look at the corners of like, like in a, in an actual cutout, is that the idea?

Dave Jones: If you look at the actual aperture itself under a microscope, what you're commonly going to see is, you know, as the laser is going through, it's leaving essentially grooves in the metal, right? Uh, from the curve. And so what you're going to see is, um, on lower quality.

Chris Gammell: I think you're going to have to define, define some of these terms. No problem. No problem. Sorry. Curf, curve and aperture.

Dave Jones: Right. So aperture is right. Uh, hopefully your audience are mostly, uh, into electronics, right? Your aperture of course is the, is the actual pad, uh, that's being cut out of the stencil, um, and the design of that. So for example, if it's a, you know, if it's a, a passive component, you're going to have two squares, right? Most commonly two squares are going to be cut out and that's your aperture. And then, um, when you, the curve is actually the diameter of the laser beam, right? And you have to account for that when you're making the cut because, because there's obviously, uh, you have to adjust the cut to be half of the diameter so that when you're cutting out the pad, you get the, the net effect is that the, uh, size that the customer has uploaded is exactly what they get as opposed to it being off by the diameter of the laser. Right. So you essentially have to account for that. Right. Yep. And so what you're going to see is when you cut this aperture, um, on, on lower quality metals, um, you're going to see a very rough, uh, sort of grooving pattern. It almost looks like a, like a washboard on a freeway, um, around the inside of the, at the stencil, uh, which can sometimes affect your paste release. Another thing that you'll notice too, is that lower quality stainless steel for stencils, um, the metal isn't truly flat. And so sometimes you'll see minor warping or minor ripples in the metal, um, that'll happen. And there's a handful of reasons that that can happen, you know, humidity and temperature at the time that it's manufactured, so on and so forth. And so we wanted to make sure, you know, that we used a metal that was going to be consistent, that was industry quality, right? That you is used in, you know, fortune 500 electronic manufacturing, some of the biggest products in the world, um, that are manufactured using these types of stencils, uh, the stencil metal rather. And so, uh, so we did our homework, you know, and the stencil metal that we use has other alloys in it so that when you do a cut, you get almost a, uh, sort of a flame polished smoothness to the inside of the aperture, which you can see very closely under a microscope, uh, which gives you a much better paste release. So the paste doesn't stick to it as much and you get a better landing on your pad, which ultimately gives you a better result for your resource.

Chris Gammell: Is that like the idea is like, uh, just a smoother, a smoother edge is going to, uh, have less surface area for the paste to stick to. Is that kind of the idea?

Dave Jones: Yep. And it also creates almost, um, almost a sheening, uh, sort of slippery sheening effect, right? When you sort of have this, uh, it's kind of like acrylic, right? When you flame polish acrylic, you get that nice, clear, glossy, uh, look. Whereas if you cut it with a, with a skill saw, you're going to get a very rough, jagged sort of edge. And that's, that's, that's a really good analogy, right? Is that on a lot of the offshore stencils, you'll sort of get that jagged interior edge on the inside of your aperture. And on ours, you get sort of this rolled glossy smoothness that allows the paste to flow better because one of the biggest enemies to a stencil is clogging. And so after you use the stencil multiple times, you're going to get old pace from the previous board that gets stuck in there. And you want to try and reduce that as much as possible.

Chris Gammell: Right. Cause then that extra, it shrinks up that hole so that then you have, you apply less paste and then you start to have all the, the soldering problems that people know about with tombstoning and all that other stuff that can happen when you don't have the right amount of paste on there. Exactly. I was always really, I was always really impressed by, so I used to work with some manufacturing engineers with some onsite PCB stuff and I didn't, I mean, I guess I should have known this, but I never really knew that they'll actually go and adjust the, you know, they'll go get a new stencil even if necessary, but to adjust the size of the stencil hole, even just to take care of manufacturing problems. So like if, if the, if there's a certain cap that always seems to tombstone and they know they need more pace there, they'll go get a new stencil that opens up the pad or the aperture for that, for that specific pad and apply more pace by just having a bigger hole there.

Dave Jones: Yep. It's crazy. Yeah. It's actually not that uncommon because you have to think that in an assembly environment, um, you know, the squeegee is automated, right? And it's doing one pass at the same pressure theoretically every time. And so depending on the design you have, you know, the two pads just above yours might have absorbed, you know, a big clump of pace. So by the time it gets to yours, you get a slight inconsistency. And so you have to open it up a little more to get more pace to land there immediately after, um, the prior pad. And this is goes back into the effect of, you know, if your paste isn't, you know, rolling well, sort of like the ocean wave concept, um, you can have that, right? You're going to get these gaps. And, uh, and so that's how you can make up for it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I would recommend people go, I mean, maybe I could try and link one in, but, um, it is interesting just kind of seeing, seeing a video of, of that, uh, the squeegeeing. Cause I mean, you could do it manually, but the machines that do it are, are obviously well calibrated and stuff like that too, where it's just sweeping across the board and you can see up close and yeah, it's really cool. Interesting to look at. I know, I know Ada for Ada for it has a bunch of those too.

Dave Jones: We're also seeing, um, you know, some of the, you know, some of the small assembly, houses and stuff. Um, and even some of the bigger ones, you know, they're, they're starting to use solder paste printers now. Um, and so we, we do supply framed and frameless stencils to some of the assembly houses, um, that, that a lot of people in the community know. And, uh, we've noticed that we noticed a drop off and orders. And it's because a lot of them are switching to solder paste printers just because they have so much manufacturing demand that, uh, it wasn't because of the quality. It was because of the speed, right? They don't need to wait for the stencil to be shipped. They can just do the order right then that day. Right. And so we're seeing a lot of the quick turn houses switch over to solder paste printers. And a lot of the guys that are not quick turn are still, are still using stencils from us.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah, it seems like a lot of the, the printer. And if people don't understand what we're talking about here, it's like a, it looks literally like an inkjet printer where it's just kind of spraying it down in little bits because it's a little, little squirts at a time in the shape of the pad. Um, but the, I think the thing is that's really good for high mix stuff, right? Where it's, it's not so much even waiting for the stencil so much as if you have 15 different designs in a day, each one would need its own stencil or you need to bundle all that stuff together. Whereas you could just print it out individually. Exactly. So that, uh, each one could, could be different. And that, and that, and that the time you give up in the rastering process to get that paste down is worth it compared to needing the stencils. I think the, the actual investment in the stencils probably negligible. It's the more of the, the mix up. And like you said, the, the time, uh, the, the time between ordering and receiving. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And that's the most common thing that we've heard is that, you know, they, they're trying to produce things quickly and it's faster for them to iterate.

Chris Gammell: So 24 hours, that's pretty good. I mean, like, so I didn't, I didn't realize it was that I have definitely gotten a stencil way before I've gotten a board. Uh, I didn't realize that you guys shoot for 24 hour delivery. That's our shipping rather.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, uh, it's something that was really important to us is, uh, you know, we wanted to try and if you, if you order today, uh, you should, your stencil should ship tomorrow. Um, when we launched stainless though, we do realize that there are, uh, a slightly different clientele for stainless. It's not just the maker and DIY community. We've attracted a lot of assembly houses and contract manufacturers to, to use our stuff now. And so they have much tighter timelines. So we did actually for stainless only, we do have a rush processing feature that if you order before 2 PM mountain time, we can actually, uh, ship your stencil same day for a very small fee and the fee scales based on time. So if you order it at 8 AM, it's like $10 cause we have more time to work on it. But if you order it at 1 59 PM, it's like $15.

Chris Gammell: It's like a, it's like a Uber, uh, what's it called? Uh, the surge pricing. Right. So yeah, you can jump the line. Yep. Uh, and so when do you, when do you recommend that people switch over to stainless? And I mean, I, I think a lot of people are just doing that probably either way just cause do you get more, do you get a even lower, lower feature sizes and higher resolution?

Dave Jones: Yeah, absolutely. So with stainless, uh, there's no feature today for an electronic component exists that we cannot cut. Um, we can literally cut all the way down to one mil challenge accepted. Yeah, no, it's, um, it, you know, it's pretty mind, mind blowing. We, we have guys that have done, uh, you know, 25 micron cuts with us. I mean, it's, it's pretty insane. Um, but yeah, you know, that was, again, one of the part of the decision processes. We wanted to make sure that we could cater to any audience because what we've seen over the last year and a half, if we've seen a huge jump in clientele from large electronics companies, big name companies that are prototyping and, you know, spinning multiple boards in house that they're hand building. Right. And they have extremely small features, um, on some of these boards. And so we wanted to make sure that we could accommodate anything.

Chris Gammell: Cause the chips are like that too, right? Exactly. You can't, you can't fight. I mean, like TI keeps making these frigging ridiculous parts. And I mean, not just TI, but I like to yell at them, but, um, you know, like everybody, you know, like there's just the package size. I understand that there's benefits to doing so, but my God, people like those four pin WLCP or whatever the hell those things are called. Like the four, the four ball BGA parts that are really popular now too.

Dave Jones: It's just really, really small. Yeah. Cool, man. It's really small. Um, so we, you know, we wanted to make sure we could handle that. And, uh, and so that, again, that was one of the other reasons that we went with the machine that we did is that, that it has incredible, uh, specifications for cut capability.

Chris Gammell: It's crazy. It's really crazy.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, so sorry. Let me get back to answering your question. You asked me, uh, when would be a good time to switch to stainless? Um, so that's a really good question. And what we often tell folks is, um, if you're going to do a lot of ultra fine, ultra precision type components or ultra precision components that are really expensive, where maybe that sock or whatever you're using is, you know, 20 or $30 as opposed to just a couple of bucks. If there's a heavy investment, invest in the right stencil, right?

Chris Gammell: I never heard anyone say, I've never heard anyone say sock. Yeah. I'm going to start saying that, but I've never heard. I was like, why are people soldering socks? That doesn't make any sense.

Dave Jones: So, um, but yeah, if you, if you have expensive components or a lot of ultra precision, really, really small components, you know, don't make the investment. You're going to, you're going to make it up in the end. You're going to have a much better reflow experience. You're probably going to get it right, uh, out the gate.

Chris Gammell: More likely to get a bunch of money anyways. Right. Exactly. You know, like you're probably used to, like, you're probably paying for $50 chips. Like why not pay for a stencil too?

Dave Jones: You know, especially when you're talking to the difference between a $10 film stencil and a, you know, $19 stainless. Why wouldn't you get the better one just to make sure you have a better experience? And so stainless also is extremely precise, right? This is one of the things about captain, although we've been very fortunate with our cutting process to have really, really high precision captain. Um, stainless is still a superior product when it comes to paste release, um, exact alignment on your board. Uh, it's just, you know, everything about it is, is going to be a much better experience. And a lot of our customers, we've actually seen a pretty large shift in our existing customer base that tried stainless. And now all they buy is stainless because you just get, you're less likely to get bridges, solder balls, all sorts of things like that because, um, the metal's more consistent. Uh, you know, you don't have to worry about it, it flexing or bending or anything like that is truly flat. And so you just, it's just overall a better experience. Plus you get better pace release, you know, the solder is going to land on your pads much better than that on film where plastic sometimes will tack up.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, it's, it's almost like, uh, I mean, cost aside, what it really comes down to is you want to save yourself. If you can save yourself a single bridge part, like you said, I mean like that, that could literally be two hours of my time, you know, like, because it just, yeah, it just changes. It's, it'll mess up your day. Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. Rework is. And that's when you can see it. I mean, if it's underneath the BGA, it's like even worse.

Dave Jones: So yeah. Rework is never a fun thing, right? So if you can reduce your chance of rework, you know, spend the extra money up front and you'll, you'll thank yourself in the end.

Chris Gammell: I mean, and, and even just for stencils in general, right? Like that's another argument just for using stencils over trying to do it by hand. Like, yes, you can do it by hand. You know, there's a lot of methods out there, but it's like, you know, starting to move, get into the, into the, um, the mode of getting used to doing this. If you're ordering parts anyways, it's worthwhile to, to throw in a stencil order. My biggest problem is usually I forget to just order stencils. I'm like, I get the parts and I'm like, Oh, that's what I forgot. You know? So you got to make it part of your, your, your process, you know?

Dave Jones: Yep. Well, we're, we have some plans this coming year to try and, um, to make, make it so that folks are less forgetful. So, um, we've got some announcements that are coming pretty soon. And that'll be pretty exciting for the community. So we've been partnering with a couple of companies to, to help streamline the stencil process. So, um, look for that later this year.

Chris Gammell: Okay, great. We'll let people guess what that is on their own. I'm sure we'll, I'm sure we'll mention it here too. So, uh, where can people find out more about you, find out more about the company?

Dave Jones: Yeah, of course. Uh, you know, you can just go to ostensils.com. Um, you know, everything is, is, uh, is there. We recently redesigned our website when we launched stainless back in June. Uh, so for, for all of you out there that, uh, you know, told us that we should embrace JavaScript, uh, you're welcome. So we've done that. Um, and so, uh, yeah, we've got a year too late.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, of course.

Dave Jones: But, uh, but we, you know, originally when we launched, believe it or not, IE, uh, eight was still pretty heavy in use. And so we tried to build for the lowest common denominator and we've realized, yeah, we're done doing that. So, um, you know, JavaScript, here we are. Yep. So, uh, but yeah, the new sites there, I mean, all the information's there. We've added a gallery, which was a request that a lot of customers asked for is, you know, what are your stencils look like? Um, what should I expect? We also added, um, pictures of boards that people have done to show the product and the, and the quality of the, uh, the reflow. And then of course we have a video tutorial section now too. These are customer made YouTube videos. These are not our own. We plan to come out with our own very soon. Uh, some instructional videos on how to use our, you know, captain and stainless stencils for, for the home hobbyist. Um, but there are videos there of other people that have, uh, written reviews about us that have great explanations and demonstrations of how to do it. Uh, most people don't see it because the, uh, video tab is not real obvious under the gallery, but it's there. I am going to be changing that soon. So it's a little easier to find. Um, but yeah, everything can be found on austincils.com. And if you ever have any questions or, you know, um, specific needs, uh, we also do a lot of custom projects. Most people don't know this is that one of the things that we learned when we launched is that people find really, really creative ways to use our service that has nothing to do with electronics. Um, because of like art projects or what? Yeah. Art projects, um, metal plates for manufacturing. Um, I mean, all sorts of stuff we've seen come through people using it for, uh, photo and UV masking, um, for painting. Believe it or not, people have made paint stencils, uh, by converting their art to Gerber. Um, so we do do custom stuff like that, believe it or not. Uh, so you can email us, uh, on our, on our website or, uh, just, you know, stencils at ostincils.com. If you have a, a, a non-electronics project and you're wondering whether or not we could cut that for you, reach out to us. We're happy to investigate it. We've also done some, uh, a lot of work in acrylic as a sort of a by-product, you know, people approach us and say, Hey, I want to, I want to do this. You have the equipment. Can you do it? Um, so we've done that. Yeah. So yeah, just, uh, everything can be found on our website.

Chris Gammell: Awesome. Well, Brent, thanks for being on. I appreciate it. Hearing about it. It's really, really good. And I'm, I'm looking for, I, I still need to order my first stainless, but I'll probably be doing that in the coming weeks. So I'm excited about that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, absolutely. Chris, we really appreciate you having us on the show and you know, we love the community and love what you guys are doing. So we're, we're, uh, we're happy and honored to be here tonight. So thank you.

Chris Gammell: All right. We'll talk to you soon. All right. Take care.