Hi. I’ve been using 3D-printed stencil holders (see pic) for applying solder paste to single boards. This makes alignment very easy and you can sometimes do multiple boards without cleaning the stencil.
In order to make this easier and more available for everyone, there are a few things Aisler could do:
provide auto-generated scad/stl files for the stencil holders
provide an option to produce smaller stencils (with smaller margins)
provide an option to add a pre-printed plastic stencil holder to orders
This is a great suggestion. I would love to give such a holder a try.
In your experience, does it provide a clean result even without tensioning the stencil?
I imagine it would work well for small boards, but not so well for larger ones.
Recently, I developed a DIY stencil stretcher frame for use with Aisler stencils. I made it from openbuilds parts (photo below). The two angle brackets on the bottom have screws that tension the stencil by pulling the bottom extrusion downward while the top one remains fixed.
This style stretcher is really only practical for larger boards though; the system that you are showing in your photo seems ideal for smaller boards.
The result seems good without tension, but I’ve never used a system with tension, or any sort of pro system, to compare.
Because the stencil fits into the plastic frame, it can’t be bigger than the 3D printer bed size. If Aisler offered an option for less margin on the stencils, that would help for larger boards.
I may have misunderstood the Aisler stencil documentation but I haven’t been able to reliably generate these the first time for new stencils, it usually takes 3-4 prints to dial it in for perfect alignment.
For my case, it would be great if Aisler auto-generated something like this, along with an option for smaller stencils. Or, maybe if they provided the data they feed into the stencil cutter, it would be possible to write a tool that converts it into a suitable OpenSCAD file.
Something like this for the rapid registration stencils would also be good, but I wonder how large the 3D printed object would have to be in that case.
