Hand Load Lines And Auto Test

The last stages of the PC manufacturing business here are the Hand Load lines and Auto Test. The Hand Load lines are where the bulk of our employees work. Each of the lines is responsible for certain division's PC boards in Bill and Dave's company. Hand Load lines do all of the manual assembly such as soldering, wiring, board modifications, and installation of oversize hardware or components. I've spent as much time as I can out on the Hand Load lines when we're out of work in the solder masking area. So far I enjoy building boards much more than anything else I've had the opportunity to try here since I was hired in.

Auto Test is an interesting part of the overall process. When we're finished with a box of boards in the hand load area, we deliver them to Auto Test which is located across the hallway from us. We have to clock in each box of boards with a time stamp device and then place the goods on the incoming shelves for the technicians. The techs grab a box of the PC boards and take them back to a station to do some functional testing and some preliminary tuning if it's required. The test stations are unusual. Each station is set up to accept modules that are made of black ESD safe plastic and have gold plated spring loaded test pins. When the technician installs the appropriate module to the station he can then load up a board and engage the vacuum. The vacuum pulls the board down into the fixture and makes contact on the gold test pins. They can then power the boards up and begin testing. Auto Test technicians primarily make sure the boards are functioning within spec and do some troubleshooting if there are problems. I would guess they probably find alot of simple dumb stuff like components installed with the polarity reversed, or damaged parts. I don't spend too much time over there interacting with those guys so I'm not really sure what else they do.

There's some other support groups we have here in the department. We have a small engineering group that will help us on the go whenever we have unforseen problems or requests for changing tooling or something else whacked out happens. I'd say they are all pretty good guys but there's definetly an oddball element to most of them there. Engineers here are kinda goofy. They are really good at what they do, but they sometimes surprise me with their weirdness. I get the feeling many of them don't see the daylight very often. Some of them are socially inept and keep to themselves. Hey as long as they do a good job that's OK with me.