I've tried two smt assembly houses and so far I've had major F*** ups.

First house:
6 connectors per board in backwards (why can't we use the boards?)
acetic cure silastic used to mount crystal (is there a difference?)
pcb had manufacturing defect that caused to solder mask to bubble
(only a small defect- what are we complaining about??)
the connector rework caused the soldermask to fall off - in order to resolve the standoff I suggested they propose a standard by which we could compare - the produced the IPC standard by which the boards were declared defective.

Did they want to re-run the boards? No way. I was being too picky and the problems were small(so they believed). We even offered to go 50-50, no go. They declared they didn't want to deal with us any more - hello? We don't want to deal with monkeys.

Second house:
Apart from quoting wrongly and them asking for more dollars (which I regretably complied with)
The boards were late and they started asking questions the week the boards were supposed to be delivered.
All the tact switches were the wrong actuator size (even though the BOM specified two part numbers and they had a sample)
The boards had a flux residue.
Substandard components were used
The pcbs were of average finish.


So could I recommend Alfatron to make boards? Ask me why?