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The Murray Percival Company, the leading supplier to the Midwest's electronics industry, announced the sale of a Kurtz Ersa VERSAFLOW 3/35 to Bennett Pump.
For over 100 years, Bennett Pump has been a leading manufacturer of retail and commercial fuel dispensers and components. Bennett Pump Company maintains its world headquarters in Western Michigan, and serves customers throughout the world. Manufacturing locations in Spring Lake, Michigan and Shanghai, China offer Bennett the flexibility to be a worldwide competitor in fuel dispensing products and service distributors wherever needed. Bennett is committed to providing customers with the right blend of features, technology, price and service.
Murray Percival’s own Dave Meert saw the need at Bennett Pump for a new wave solder machine, and brought the Ersa VERSAFLOW 3/35 to the table.
“We were struggling to maintain a 20+ year old wave solder machine,” commented James Fontaine, Manufacturing Engineer, Bennett Pump. “Our assembly mix grew to require more detailed soldering than the wave was able to complete without regular rework attention. We were continuously adding to our production head count for hand soldering activities to support demand. We did evaluations with three of the top selective solder equipment manufacturers in the industry using our most complex assemblies. All three manufacturers had similar throughput results, and Ersa provided us with the best process education, presentation, equipment features and support within our budget.”
The machine configuration of the VERSAFLOW 3/35 consists of flux, preheat, and solder module with segmented conveyor system. It incorporates all options necessary to meet the customer’s requirements on tomorrow’s manufacturing processes.
“We are a high-mix/low-volume OEM with about 100 unique assemblies,” continued Fontaine. “Some assemblies were still 100% hand soldered until the Ersa VERSAFLOW provided the flexibility we needed to automate the work. Some assemblies would take 35-40 minutes each to hand solder but can now be completed in about 8 minutes each on the selective solder machine, an 80% efficiency gain!”.
