At 08:59 AM 5/9/02 +0500, James Paul wrote: > All, > > "To each his own". If you don't think geographic proximity is important, > That's fine. I don't have a problem with it. I use AP Circuits quite frequently for prototyping double sided boards - probably at least once a month. Great results. One of the reasons it works so well is that their people do an outstanding job of verifying that the board is correct. They catch goofs such as traces touching, hole diameters larger than the pad, missing holes - anything that seems wrong prompts them to make a phone call and check with you before the boards are made. I've been using them for a LONG time now and pretty much have the whole process down pat - I usually never get a call from them. But they did catch a goof-up just recently and they did call and they were able to fix the problem right there and then and the boards STILL made it back to me within the usual time! There is one more side to their customer service attitude that I would like to mention: I got a phone call from them several years back asking me to double check the plated through holes in the boards that I had just received. Turns out they were defective! They shipped replacement boards the next day and I'm convinced that phone call saved many hours of debugging. That is also the ONLY time I ever received a bad board from them and I just went into my comms package log file to check: I've been dealing with them (by modem) since 1992. Back to the subject at hand: this is your first run at this. If you think the design is finalized, do the board layout and send it off to a proto house. You will have the boards in your hands 2 or 3 days later and you can make sure that everything fits and everything works. Then you can shop around for the best price for production quantities of your boards. And if does turn out that something doesn't fit or your client wants changes, make those changes and get new prototypes made. Only after you are positive that the design is stable and locked should you go for the production quantities. dwayne Dwayne Reid Trinity Electronics Systems Ltd Edmonton, AB, CANADA (780) 489-3199 voice (780) 487-6397 fax Celebrating 18 years of Engineering Innovation (1984 - 2002) .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .- `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' Do NOT send unsolicited commercial email to this email address. This message neither grants consent to receive unsolicited commercial email nor is intended to solicit commercial email. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.