After struggling for some time using homemade stencil holders and bits of tape to hold the stencils down we decided to buy a commercial stencil holder. Most seemed to be around the £2000 mark and only take large framed stencils and then I found the TECHNO SD 240 Manual operated stencil printer from http://www.spide-smt.nl/

The specs of the stencil printer showed it had “Accurate X, Y and Rotation alignment of the PCB table.” which looked like it would be ideal for our needs with smaller stencil sizes and not needing to have mounting holes in the stencils.

I ordered the stencil printer from a UK supplier (Blundell, who was very helpful) and after a week it arrived.

Upon unpacking the stencil printer we found that it didn’t look like the photo from the suppliers and manufacturer's website (see below) and the Y-axis adjustment of the PCB table as shown on the manufacturer's website didn’t exist.

The PCB table has two dials on one side for moving and slight rotation of the PCB table on the X axis but nothing to move the Y axis.

The stencil holder and its rails do allow a small amount of Y-axis adjustment when the stencil is installed but this is limited to a couple of mm each way when the springs on the stencil holder mount are tensioned.

The overall build quality seems OK and it is heavy enough to not move around the bench but not too heavy to be easily moved and stored when not in use.

We found when working on small PCBs (under 50mm square) the PCB holders which are magnetic will hit the top stencil holder stopping it from going down far enough. This would be easily resolved when using a larger stencil but as all the stencils from our PCB supplier only have a 20mm margin on the boards we either need to buy larger stencils or buy some very thin metal and extend the sides of the stencil to clear the magnetic PCB holders.

The photo from the manufacturer is different to the product supplied.

sd240 printer