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You can get boards from the Far East very cheaply.
What you can't do is get them in 48 hours.
We can do boards in 24, 48 hours.
Three days tends to be a standard.
In the last 12 months, 62 percent of every circuit board we've made has gone out early.
That doesn't include the stuff that went on time.
The nickel gold is one of the newer finishes that we offer which is an electroless
nickel immersion gold.
That puts 3 microns of nickel and then about 0.1 of a micron of gold on the surface of
the board, which gives you a lovely flat finish for surface‑mount components to be
assembled on.
Give it a once over and look for any obvious mistakes.
It's not a witch hunt for trying to spot people's mistakes.
It's just trying to deliver a product that's going to work at the end of the day.
It's important because once it's gone through the design process, and the manufacturing
process, you can't make any more changes.
So it could cost him time and money.
Customers like our approachability, the fact that we are friendly, we're
on the end of a phone.
We are the people that are dealing with their work.
There are lots of services where you can buy a PCB for a rock‑bottom price, but we will
give you that extra bit of information.
People say to us, "Well, I knew that it's a board that's that sort of size and that sort
of technology.
I knew what price I was going to get from you."
It's true.
There is such consistency which makes being able to price your own projects, and being
able to get a feel for where a project is going, that much more consistent and easy to
manage.
China isn't a threat.
China's an asset.
We can use that for the larger volume.
UK manufacturers aren't a threat to us, because we can say to them, "OK, we don't make
that particular type of technology.
Can you do it for us"?
And they do.
That reciprocation that goes through on so many levels is now the power of the business
rather than the thing that's threatened us.
One woman who retired about a year and a half ago, her son still works with us.
He's now about 35 years old.
He started when he was 16.
Her daughter worked with us until she had her own children.
We're expecting those to apply for jobs soon.
It's been that kind of philosophy.
I have known the staff at Minnitron, some for 35 years of my life.
As such, they're friends, they're colleagues, and I've had total responsibility to their
lives, their livelihood, and their families.
We've never laid a person off in all of the years that we've been in business, in 51
years.
Well, there's two versions of this.
One is the original business was in Minnis Road in Birchington.
The other one was that we used to do very small servo motors and things.
It was a mini electronics thing.
There's differences of opinion, so...
The father started the company in 1962 as an extension of his retail electrical
business.
He'd always been in the electrical business.
I know he's always relating the stories of how he used to take in people's accumulators
for recharging, for the old radios of the time.
My father was involved in model making, or with people doing model making ‑‑
radio‑controlled boats, radio‑controlled airplanes ‑‑ That was a lot of the business.
The early business was making electronics for those.
The very first board we made was something we managed to reclaim from the company that I
worked for that went bankrupt.
That was a slip ring which was used on deck and navigator radar systems.
I think because we've kept a manageable size and kept it in the family basically, we've
kept control.
I think what people really find with their experience with using Minnitron
is that they really trust what we're saying to them because of the experience.
We do *** on about our experience all the time, but it's a really key element of being
able to offer a fuller service to our customers.
I think people enjoy the experience of working with us, because we do hand hold.
It's very open.
There's lots of honesty.
There's no hidden agenda.
You'll get all the facts that you need right at the beginning.
We're confident at Minnitron that you will get an excellent service, right from
execution, right through to delivery.