Community Spotlight: Ken Taylor, Owner of TayCo Products and GM at Utility Innovation Group

We're excited to introduce Ken Taylor as this month’s Community Spotlight. Ken has been a user of the LumenPnP from the very beginning and has continued to build up his collection, now comprised of seven total LumenPnPs!

Ken has 25+ years of experience in the SMT industry, having even helped develop a solder paste that he still uses to this day. We hope you enjoy learning about how Ken uses his LumenPnPs to produce PCBAs.

                                                  

Tell us a bit about yourself and what you make.

My name is Ken Taylor, and I am the GM of Energy Efficiency at Utility Innovation Group. I also own a company called TayCo Products. Utility Innovation Group (UIG) was founded by the core leadership team that helped shape the U.S. microgrid market. We have experts in utility protection and controls engineering, substation and distribution equipment, microgrid development, LED security lighting, and energy finance. We work with the largest energy users and producers worldwide. 

I have always been an entrepreneur at heart and enjoyed designing and making electronic products.  TayCo Products gives me the opportunity to continue to do those types of activities on a smaller scale.  I am currently working on a desktop robotic soldering station that will do point-to-point soldering.  I am excited to get that product out early next year.  My goal is to make this a very affordable solution for people with low to medium volume soldering needs.  This will be the first of several products that will be developed over the next year. 

In addition to products, I will also be adding services to help advise those trying to start making their own products.  In a factory setting, you need engineering/support to cover all the related disciplines to manufacture products.  This is obviously not feasible for most small companies, but you still need to have your bases covered.  I have 25+ years of experience in electronic engineering, assembly, quality, and operations and degreed in Automation/Robotics. 

I have been responsible for manufacturing just about everything from Class 6 implantable medical devices to consumer electronics, and I would love to come up with a way to share my experience with all of those folks trying to do any type of electronic manufacturing.  I do not know yet what that model looks like exactly, but it is definitely a goal by year-end. 

I have secured a domain name and have the skeleton of a website that will be developed in the coming months.  Looking forward to helping people get their operations started up or working better!  In the meantime, we are growing exponentially at UIG, and manufacturing in-house has become our means to control cost, quality, and delivery of security lighting products.
 

What are you building with your LumenPnP? 

We make a combination of mixed-technology boards containing through-hole and mostly SMT components. Most of the circuit boards we make are used in controls, power supplies, LED light engines, communication and test products, and whatever else we may need to fill out our portfolio of products.

 

Did you build or buy a LumenPnP? Have you made any modifications from the original build?

I actually have been a user of the LumenPNP for several years now. We have a total of 5 LumenPNP machines at UIG and I have 2 LumenPNP machines at TayCo Products. We have every version of the LumenPNP that has been sold from V1 to V3. We have done some mods to power supplies, board holders, added linear rails, customized some feeders, and so on. I have been able to add capacity incrementally as the business needs have grown.

What is your favorite feature of the LumenPnP?

I love that this machine is an enabler for companies to bring manufacturing back in house in some cases or start manufacturing in others. The affordability and scalability make it a no brainer for me. I also have loved the support I get from the Opulo team. In several thousand hours of run time logged, I have not run into many issues at all, but when I do, they have always been there to provide support.

How many boards a month do you produce with your machines?

We can build about 2k boards/month currently but plan on buying more LumenPnP machines as business needs dictate it. We have several pending contracts that would take us to multiples of the quantities we produce now. I also plan to buy more machines for TayCo Products over the next few months.

How were you building these boards before the LumenPnP?

Before the LumenPnP, we were building boards by hand and outsourcing most of our products.
 

What has the LumenPnP enabled you to do that you previously couldn't?

Interesting story for folks here.  All of our current manufacturing was to be outsourced, and we had no capability in-house to do anything other than hand assembly.  We had a new LED security light with some patented technology that we had expected volumes of 20k per year.  I went to 16 contract manufacturing companies across the world from China, Thailand, Venezuela, Singapore, Mexico, and so on. 

I had already gone out for a quote on the BOM based on our expected quantities and came up with some labor costs based on the price of doing the manufacturing in-house so we had a fairly accurate target cost.  Much to my surprise, every contract manufacturer came back over double our cost.  This did not include tariffs or shipping, so this was a straight up comparison and not landed cost. 

In the next steps, we did an analysis to determine the capital cost associated with buying equipment and building the product in-house.  During this exercise, I found Opulo and it all clicked in terms of what we needed to do.  Manufacturing in-house just became feasible again!  Our estimated costs to build in-house have proven to be very accurate.
  

What is the single most important piece of advice for people who are trying to get into PCBA production?

Try your best to educate yourselves about PCBA manufacturing!  There are a lot of resources out there to pull information from, but unfortunately, all advice is not good advice.  Don't be afraid to jump in with a little knowledge and figure it out as you go but be smart about it.
  

What's your solder paste of choice? What do you use for a reflow oven?

I use a solder paste that I helped develop with AIM products back in the early days of SMT, called 291AX. It is a resin-based no-clean with excellent wetting properties and stencil life that leaves almost no visible residue after reflow. It is also very forgiving in terms of the oven profile and oven temperature control, which is important in processing the way most of us would do low-to-medium-scale production. 

The residue can also be probed for many days after reflow, making any type of in-circuit testing easier. For reflow, we have a modified AE-5010 reflow oven, which is fairly common for benchtop reflow. We have modified it quite extensively, and it works great now and produces good results. We can now solder metal core PCBs and FR4 side by side with good reflow profiles for both.