Soldering wire, Flux recommendation

[ali_asadzadeh]

Hi,
This question seems kinda obvious, but recently I wanted to update my soldering tools and material, So I tough I would ask in here what do you use for soldering and would recommend, for mid range to professional range kind of works, including lot's of MELF, BGA and rework!

I have these brands in my mind, Solder wire and solder sphere I want to use ASAHI solder (please recommend which other brand,wire size and sphere sizes to buy, since I have different mixes of parts, Including low tech parts to more recent 0.5mm BGA parts) But I'm confused for which models, for FLUX I have Amtech brand in my mind, regarding soldering oil, what do you recommend?

For soldering TIP what types and brands do you recommend?

I hope this would help lot's of people.
Regards

[modernjack3]

The Amtech AMTECH NC-559-V2-TF Flux is just perfect imo... I cant really give any advice on the rest though :/

Greetings, Jack

[tooki]

FYI, I think the lack of replies can be attributed to two things:
1. far too broad a question, so any complete reply would have to be a novel
2. lots and lots of previous discussions covering probably most of what you want to know.

Do a google site search for the solder threads here, and then come back with specific, answerable questions.

[ali_asadzadeh]

Thanks for the hints, Maybe sharing with us,which brands you use would be a short and useful answer

[tooki]

See #2 above. Solder brands have been discussed *to death* many times here already.

[mariush]

See this

I simply buy bottles of liquid flux from TME.EU, a flux made by a Polish company Topnik or something like that. Cheap plain rosin based flux with some halides included ... here's a list of them the list

I avoid the water soluble ones as they typically require additional cleaning... the no-clean ones and the plain rosin based ones typically don't require cleaning and they don't leave a lot of residue.

[exe]

Flux question is actually much more difficult than it seems to be.

For general work I'd recommend some rosin-based no-clean mildly-activated flux (yeah, I'm using cheap Polish fluxes). May be BGA fluxes as they supposed to be really no-clean (but it's always worth checking). For BGA work I don't know what to pick.

Concerning AMTECH, I have NC-559-AS, it needs to be cleaned, at least if not fully activated (heated). Because otherwise it is conductive and corrosive. I've done the whole mini-research on fluxes. General conclusion: clean it well, unless absolutely sure about its properties (but it's almost never the case, most flux datasheets do not provide enough information).

Needless to say there are many fakes around. I'd suggest avoid buying flux from ebay, aliexpress, etc.

[TJ232]

I'm using different sizes of Stannol Kristall 400 series solder wire (SN100C) and must say that I'm impressed with the results. If you need/want a lead-free one it's hard to find a better one. Don't torture yourself using SAC305 for hand soldering.
Kristall 400 has great wettability, feels more like the old style and easy to work lead solder than the usual lead-free one.
Flux class is IEC61190, REL0.