Has anybody tried the service?
Nice! Those are great prices for little modules.
Hey Architect. Someone sent me a link to this thread so I wanted to pop over and say hello to the community.
OSH Stencils is a new company that was launched on July 8th. We wanted to provide a low cost high quality stencil solution following a similar framework to OSH Park which many of you may know who they are. (We are not the same company but we work closely together).
We’ve put extensive time into a web interface and proprietary rendering engine to make stencil ordering as easy as possible while giving you a lot of control and flexibility on how you want your stencils.
We also support custom engraving so if you want logos or personalized text on your stencil borders, or a project name or board rev for example you can do that to make tracking your stencils easier.
Our goal is to provide metal stencils as well in the future. If we keep the momentum up that we have today, the future will be soon.
We’re excited to be involved in the community being die hard EE proto nerds ourselves, and if you have any questions about our service pop by the site and shoot me an e-mail via the contact link.
-B
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@ OSHStencils - Welcome to the community!
I just placed my first order. I can’t wait to try it out. <$11 w/ free shipping. A great deal!
Wow… 1.5 hrs later I got a notification that it had shipped! This service is getting better by the minute. 
Hello B!
Thanks for stopping by and introducing your service. I am sure there will be more orders coming from this community 
Cheers,
V
No problem.
If you want to see a sample of one of our stencils, you can check this link out. I cut this last night for a customer who had zero sharp corners. He loves rounded edges and every design he’s sent me so far there’s not a single sharp edge.
http://www.oshstencils.com/image_gallery/cut_sample2.jpg
This is mostly 0603 components, and there’s one .5mm pitch IC in the middle, this is a 10x Zoomed image, no editing, this is straight out of my cut process and onto my scanner bed.
We’re building an image gallery to highlight our capability. I’ve got a stencil I just cut that is loaded with BGA, and .8mm ball dots for DDR2 memory, and a lot of .5mm or smaller pitch ICs.
I’ll post that up once I can get some time to scan it later tonight.
Ian: Thanks for giving us a try!
-B
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This is interesting. We actually ordered some materials to make stencils with our laser long time ago. Done little testing as we were busy figuring out the acrylic for now.
Good job on your services and welcome to the community.
Just wanted to circle back.
http://www.oshstencils.com/image_gallery/cut_sample3.jpg
This is .8mm BGA (.35mm diameter holes), 1mm BGA, .5mm pitch ICs, and a bunch of 0402.
This is a 10x zoom image, it’s a 2 inch stencil to put it into perspective, and the zoom doesn’t do it justice. It’s much nicer in person and under a microscope. My photos keep exposing too much white around the edges, probably a little reflection of the background.
Enjoy, and thanks to those of you who have been trying our service, we appreciate the support.
-B
We just added acrylic stencil jigs to our website at checkout, you can pick black or white for $5.
More features are coming this week.
-B
Great! These are helpful.
Is there any way to see what this is w/o placing an order? I’m sure its something I wish you’d had when I placed my order a few days ago… 
It is nothing too complicated. Two L shaped acrylic pieces to hold a pcb fixed, while applying the paste.
Yes Ian. If you login to the site, and add something to your cart, then press checkout and go to the next screen (before you commit to buy), at the bottom will be pictures of the jigs to purchase.
Here is a direct link to the images for quicker viewing.
http://www.oshstencils.com/assets/osh_jig_black.jpg
Or
http://www.oshstencils.com/assets/osh_jig_white.jpg
These just allow you to hold your board in place. Many folks use old unused PCBs for this, but this is an inexpensive alternative designed for the purpose.
When the image gallery is done, I’ll add the jigs there too in a couple days so you can see them easily without having to see them on the checkout page.
-B
Ah. I see. Yea, I’d planned to use scrap PCBs in a similar manner. I may have to pick some of those up on a future order.
I just finished deploying a new render engine. I’ve done my best to replicate an exact image of what you will receive as a customer when ordering.
It should be really clear now on how your stencil will sit and you can maximize your cost savings by adjusting the border to exactly what you need.
This is a big improvement over the previous render engine.
Give it a try
-B
I received my stencil a few days after ordering it and it looks perfect. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to try it out yet. Hopefully, that will happen this weekend and I can give a full report.
@ OSHStencil - One thing you might consider is a cutting area rate vs. A padding rate. When I placed the order I initially thought I was going to be paying for my PCB (cut) area. After going through the site, I realized that I needed to add a couple inches all around for padding which doubles or triples the sq inch cost. It was cheap regardless and I’ll definitely do it again but that felt like an area that could be improved.
Thanks for the suggestions Ian.
Since the material is expensive, it would be difficult to calculate based on the cut area since users can control their border sizes. If someone had 3 single pads (as an example) that might register as $.50 but then they set a 2 inch border, now I’ve gone into a negative money situation because the border in material cost would exceed the cut area price point.
If I were to lock the border sizes, then I could do pricing based on cut area because I’d know what the maximum extents of a stencil would be, however in your case you needed more border, so if I picked an arbitrary amount your stencil may not fit properly on your jig/board. However, most people are the opposite and need less border.
I’m a big fan of giving the user complete control and flexibility in what they want. I do however recognize that you probably have 2 sides of your stencil that don’t need as much border as the ones attached to the jig.
I’m working on two new features to make that much more friendly to the user cost-wise. I hope to have them done by the end of next week.
We also have added some useful freebies that are starting to ship with every order as well.
There’s more to come as we grow! Stay tuned!
-B
Sorry, I think I wasn’t clear. By “cut area” I didn’t mean the area that was actually cut out. I was referring to the entire area occupied by the uploaded file. What I was suggesting was that you could charge that area at one rate and the area of padding added through your web wizard at a different rate since you know there won’t be any cutting going in that area. It would be a very simple thing. I wasn’t suggesting you figure out the area of every tiny cut
Again, this is not even really a serious suggestion due to the fact that your service is so affordable already.
I’m pleased to announce that dynamic text entry engraving is now live and available.
You can enter up to 3 lines of text to go along your stencil border. This way you can identify your stencils by board revisions, date, or anything you want to put there.
You can still include your own “Engrave” Gerber file if you’d like to include graphics/logos and things like that, but for those that just want plain text, you can now do it without a Gerber by just typing the text in via the website.
-B
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