OSH stencils

I just want to bring attention to these guys.

I bought a stencil from them recently for prototyping and it's great!
Typically cheap stencils have cost me more than the PCB, but these guys do it fast and cheap.

OSH Stencils

While it's obviously not the same quality as a stainless steel stencils I use for production boards it does the job for prototypes without putting a hole in your wallet.

Free intl shipping, no start up cost. Only rule is a minimum 5$ order. The shipping is super fast as well!

Better quality than other places that make cheap stencils, better prices, and faster shipping. What more could you want?

A few folks here have homemade laser cutters that they are trying to cut polyimide with. You think maybe that is what they are doing too? Thanks for sharing

Yup, they are cutting it out of polyimide. Right price for people who don't have friends with laser cutters

Community,

Someone sent me an email about this thread, and I wanted to drop by and thank you for sharing your experience Arg, and introduce myself.

To clarify a couple of things. We do indeed use Polyimide for our stencils, at 3mil thickness (.003"), which is pretty standard for prototyping and low volume runs. Some of you have heard of it as being called Kapton, Kapton is Polyimide, that's just a well recognized brand name for it. We're looking at offering 5mil (.005") as an option as well to give the users more options.

We ship worldwide, and domestic shipping is Free, International shipping is $2 for standard mail, and of course higher if you want it fast.

We do not use hobby grade lasers, we use high end professional equipment and our cut quality and precision are very important to us. We charge by the square inch, and as Arg says we have a $5 minimum order.

If you want to see a sample of our work you can look here:

http://www.oshstencils.com/image_gallery/cut_sample2.jpg

This is a 10x zoomed image with a .5mm pitch IC, and several 0603 components with all rounded edges.

Another example here:

http://www.oshstencils.com/image_gallery/cut_sample3.jpg

This is also a 10x zoomed image, with multiple .5mm pitch IC's, some .8mm BGA with .35mm holes (DDR Memory in the middle), and a ton of 0402 stuff. To give you an idea, this stencil was 2 x 2.5 inches in size.

I apologize for the white edges on the images. These are completely un-edited images, and the lighting tends to reflect back off the white background. The actual cuts are sharp and crisp and several of our users have examined them under a microscope and given us great feedback.

We also offer custom engraving around the border edges so you can put logos, text, or anything you want to identify your stencils.

Our goal is to offer low cost metal based stencils in the near future, but if we can maintain this momentum it won't be long.

We encourage you to check us out and our competitors. We feel that our pricing is very difficult to beat even on international orders, and the quality is top notch.

Thanks again for the write up Arg, we're happy to have helped!

-B

Thanks for doing this! Could possibly put in an option to panelize boards like they do at OSHpark, so that the two sites would be compatible?

Thanks Wolfman. Can you give me a little more information about your panelizing comment? If you mean having a giant stencil that can go on a panelized board, we can do it as long as it doesn't exceed 12"x24" in size. We would just need the Gerber of the panel paste layer. You can also order multiple copies of your stencil by just adding it multiple times to your shopping cart.

We are working towards offering metal stencils at low prices soon, and once we do that we can also increase our panel size/support.

That's exactly what I mean. But you couldn't automate that process for us? I feel it's a hassle for Neal to have to go through and panelize the boards for us. I only have a single PCB laid out, he is the one who has the panelized files.

Depending on how big the panel is. Laen and I work closely together, so if you asked him to send me the panel file, I could easily make you a master sheet. Again as long as it's not bigger than 12x24. I'll be able to do larger sizes in the future.

Both of us could easily automate it, we already do this on the backend, we would just need one to be the authority as my automated panel may be laid out different than his.

Well that's great! Whenever I need a panel made up, I'll make sure to ask Laen to send you over the panel file ^_^

Sounds good We'll be happy to assist.

I'll be ordering stencils from you sometime!

Look very high quality in those pictures.

Unfortunately I already have bought overpriced stencils from polulu for all the boards I need right now. Next stencil I get will definitely be from you though!

We've made a lot of changes to the site over the last 2 weeks. We've updated our rendering engine a great deal to produce a life-like example of exactly what your stencil will look like.

We're also including free plastic solder paste spreaders with every order. (Beats using a credit card!)

You can see an example here:
http://www.oshstencils.com/image_gallery/OSHStencils_Solder_Spreader.jpg

There's a handful of additional new features coming in the next two weeks. Stay tuned!

-B

I'm pleased to announce that dynamic text entry engraving is now live and available.

You can enter up to 3 lines of text to go along your stencil border. This way you can identify your stencils by board revisions, date, or anything you want to put there.

You can still include your own "Engrave" Gerber file if you'd like to include graphics/logos and things like that, but for those that just want plain text, you can now do it without a Gerber by just typing the text in via the website.

-B