What are Mouse Bites?

Mouse Bites are a line of holes in a PCB board functioning much like the lines of holes used on an array of postage stamps.

Recently Tronex was asked by a good customer to develop a special hand tool for separating small, thin printed circuit boards from larger panels. This is a process called depanelizing. The individual PCB's were .4mm in thickness and were separated by a gap of 2.5mm. The customer wanted to separate the individual PCB's by breaking the panel along a series of Mouse Bites.  

To be able to do this Tronex engineers needed to modify the Model 551 bent nose pliers in two ways:

• Rotate the plane of the jaws 90 degrees into the plane of the handles 
• Reduce the width of the jaws to fit into the gap

Feedback from the customer on Tronex's first design was:

"We like it, but the jaws are not fine enough.  

Please look at our photo."   

The photo (above, right) clearly shows that the first set of pliers are too thick to fit within the gap.  

However, the second prototype, Model 554, to quote the satisfied customer:

• Now even easier to find the tools you need
• You can send your customers to our site to review products
• Easily view our catalog from anywhere!