THE AUTOMATIC JAPANESE SOLDERING MACHINES IN BPL

 From 1980 to year 2000 full twenty years BPL made Television sets now called the Dome TV. Mrs.Indira Gandhi on returning as Prime Minister sanctioned the large scale expansion of TV transmitters creating a sudden explosion of the Television Market. There were hardly any tv's in the country and only very few very privileged people had them. The sudden explosion of the TV market meant a huge demand for TV sets and there was only one channel namely the DOORDARSHAN.

Dyanora, Solidaire ,Bush were all few names during these times and into this market gate-crashed a less known electronics company called BPL which was till then known for making Medical Electronics products. With the pioneering spirit of its JMD (Joint Managing Director) K P R Nambiar BPL for several years later had dominance in various forms over the TV industry.

Initially TV was made with hands-on soldering and with time imported two automatic soldering machines from SANYO.

These machines were of a splendid nature and showed superior Japanese engineering skills of these times.Some twenty  operators would stuff the PCB( printed circuit board) in a production line and it would enter the machine  which operated with many sets of relays..the most key part being a solder bath at very high temperature arising on the operation of a relay and automatically soldering the entire PCB and another set of two TUNGSTEN CARBIDE cutters driven at high RPM cutting the leads of the electronic components after soldering. With the arrival of these machines the Production quantity at BPL quadrupled. The machine had a circular design with PCB's taking a U turn at both ends.It was a treat watching them work.

There must be such machines in vogue even today. These machines can give sudden maintenance problems of many kinds and periodic servicing of some kind and spares replacement can prevent break downs and critical maintenance issues.

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SOLVING THE TRANSFORMER PROBLEM AT BPL

It was somewhere in 1988 or 1989 ..I was working at the BPL Transformer shop in 80 Koramangala Industrial Estate where coils and transformers were made for Television sets.

There were two key power transformers made at this plant and I being basically an Electrical Engineer found great joy in handling these transformers. One of these transformers stepped down 230 volts to 15 volts..the problem started when Sanyo stopped the supply of these transformers and it had to be made in-house.These transformers were used in the LAN model which was a remote controlled TV.

The original Japanese transformer was very concise and elegant and duplicating it would be an herculean task..we tried to reverse engineer one of those transformers but were not successful which bespeaks of the competence of Japanese manufacturing technology.

However a local design was developed...some 3000 turns of 44 gauge  wire on the primary side..and some 300 turns of guage 34 on the secondary side with I think type 17 crngo laminations. I dont precisely remember the design but it was something like this. But the problem was it should withstand 4000 volts which it wasn't.

The problem is that majority of the Engineering personnel at BPL of that time were Electronics people who panicked at this issue but I knew it could be done.

One afternoon I wrapped the transformer tightly with three layers of teraoka tape and the transformer was withstanding 4000 volts. Many batches were made using my prototype and finally we succeeded in orchestrating a full plastic version similar to the Japanese one.

I did something at BPL in retrospect which saved the situation interim.