Datsun 510 LED Tail Light Production Begins

Hey everyone!  It has been a long few weeks over here at BA Engineering.  There have been a lot of late nights and coffee BUT we are finally ready to start selling some of these tail lights!  Since our last post, we have calibrated the reflow oven and ran a few test batches of tail light panels with great success.

Being our first product, there were a number of processes that we needed to familiarize ourselves with in order to be efficient and as effective as possible. The first part of this process was applying solder paste to the product. In commercial board houses, a machine takes care of this in a fast and efficient way. Unfortunately, we do not have access to such machines, so we chose to purchase a stencil for these units and manually apply solder paste.

Placing the LEDs and power management surface mount components on the board is a time consuming task that must be carefully executed in order to properly allow the solder to reflow and adhere onto the PCB.  Again, many board houses will utilize a pick and place machine (we are thinking of buying/making one :D), but for us, we chose to do this small first batch of units by hand.

Once the surface mount components are attached to the board, we then insert the through hole components into the board and hand solder these pieces. While this being completed, another one of us works on crimping pins and attaching connectors to the harnesses that link the car to the tail light panels themselves.

Taking the time ensure everything is working properly is the final step of the process. At BA Engineering, we test each and every harness and board for proper performance on an actual vehicle. This allows us to be confident our units are functioning as they should before they head out to the customer.

We are very excited to show the world our creation and can’t wait to continue developing more products in the future!