Blog
Field notes from Jason Wu — 30+ years of hands-on THT auto insertion experience. Articles on custom-designed SMT & THT machines, odd-form feeding, wave soldering, and spare parts for future-proof, cost-effective EMS production lines.
Odd-form parts do not arrive in tape. A distributor in South America needed a belt feeder and a gripper nozzle for an installed placement platform, and neither request had a part number. Here is the four-question method
Six product categories already supplied to a Mexican industrial partner. Then they asked about laser welding - as a potential distributor. Ten workstreams in two days, and not one of them was a price.
Nine consecutive orders through 2023 and 2024, then silence. The account in Central Europe came back through a fixture cleaning requirement — a product line that had never been sold there.
A French EMS provider asked for titanium wave soldering fingers in Jan 2026. The purchase order arrived on 8 Apr 2026 - and the six-step study sequence that produced it is worth copying in full.
Wave soldering fingers for an Indian EMS provider, quoted three days after the enquiry — and only after a structured product study was finished on 13 Dec 2025. Rushing to reply is what gets the profile wrong.
Four spare-part batches, six machine categories, one shipment—for a Turkish PCB assembler. The real saving wasn't in the unit rate; it was in the number of vendors a mixed insertion line had to manage.
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