Photo courtesy Fourslide Spring and Stamping
Young Electric Sign Company (YESCO) has been able to reduce costs for its large-scale digital signage projects by ordering custom electrical grounding contacts from Fourslide Spring and Stamping.
The smallest metal parts can be among the most important components in larger sign products. How they are specified, designed and manufactured can play a vital role in overall reliability and cost.
When Brent Brown, an engineering consultant for YESCO, set out to design a group of grounding clips for printed circuit board (PCB) subassemblies, he knew it would be important to use the right manufacturing technology. Some of YESCO’s larger displays use more than 10,000 PCB subassemblies to control computer-sequenced light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
“Since the displays are typically in service for 10 to 15 years outdoors, quality, corrosion, cost per part, spring tension and spring-back were among the issues considered for these contacts,” says Brown. “At first, you look for an off-the-shelf part, but in this case, it had to be custom. We had a number of companies quote the tooling and parts, but they were too expensive.”
Fourslide’s integration of stamping and forming operations allowed its part-making process to cut costs, lead times and after-production adjustments.
Once he was satisfied with the first surface-mounted grounding contact, Brown designed two more, along with two pin-mounted grounding contacts. Approval took about eight weeks for all five types of parts, compared to 12 weeks or longer for many progressive dies.
“The prototypes and products worked the first time and we haven’t had any trouble with them,” says Brown. “If we do another subassembly that requires a different grounding contact, it would be relatively easy and inexpensive, because the process is versatile in building different parts with minor tooling changes.”
