I do not know if this helps or not, but I've worked with pick and place and chip shooters for over 7 years. One of the big things to consider is that on all the machines I've ever worked with the the machine will turn on the vaccum for picking up and carrying of the componet. But as the machine places the componet vaccume is reversed and the componet is helped off the nozzle with a gentle burst of air. Very important with smaller 0402's 0603, 0201's.

Nozzle size is dictated by what your going to try and pick up. The larger the part the larger the nozzle. Nozzles material varies much between differnt manufactures as does the pattern a nozzle can have. Panasonic for some of the smaller nozzles used a diamon epozy tip that supposedly lasted longer. The opening was an "X" shape. But that was for the smaller chips. After that they went over to straight tubes. For the really large parts you could get into custome nozzles down to robotic gripper like arms for some connectors.

Fuji, the nozzles were aluminum, but they would mushroom over time. So the switched over to stainless steel. I still have a windmill off a chip shooter. Missing a nozzle or two for it but I'll try and post a picture of it Friday. I have finals tommorrow and should be studying.

Their use to be a company called manncorp
Did a goggel for them. They are still in buisness. http://www.manncorp.com/

They use to put out a brochure that had alot of closeup of their equipment and you could see how it all worked. They had a very primative machine that used a tray at a angle to center the componets. It was to primative for the company I worked for then's needs but their constant bombardment of myself with sales liturature made me atleast remember their name.

Take a look at their site and fill out the web form so you can get the brochures for the machines. I don't think they offer the really primative SMT placer any mre since I didn not see it on their site, but a call to them might yield an old brochure.