| General > General Technical Chat |
| How to demonstrate leaded verses lead-free microsoldering performance? |
| << < (4/4) |
| SerieZ:
Almost everything produced this day (at least in Europe) is done without Pb. Even Military Applications are slowly but steadily switching to Pb Free. I myself have only soldered like 1 or 2 Boards with Pb last year. |
| lukego:
Follow up: I had been disappointed in the way my SAC305 solder flowed and especially the way it clumped up while tinning tips. I had wrongly attributed this to the surface tension of the alloy but it was in fact due to poor wetting properties of the flux core. Specifically I had bad results with ChipQuik SAC305 with "No Clean Water Washable" flux core (and several no-name Chinese solder wires.) I have now switched to ChipQuik and Multicore SAC305 solder wire with RA flux core and the performance is much better, comparable to Kester 44 in my opinion so far. So now I'm able to properly tin my tips with lead-free solder and should avoid some expensive dewetting failures of my tips. |
| exe:
I'd avoid any water-soluble fluxes as chances are they absorb moisture. I know it's claimed "no-clean", but I don't trust this label unless proven otherwise. That's because I haven't seen a water-soluble flux that doesn't require cleaning and doesn't conduct. In many cases "no-clean" means something else than most people think: it means flux can be left uncleaned if flux goes through the thermal profile in reflow owen. Such fluxes are not suitable for hand-soldering with an iron due to incomplete flux activation. |
| lukego:
Here's another demo video showing that I can still do playful hand-soldering using hot tweezers and 0402s on the "new normal" of lead-free/SAC305: I'm really happy about that because I'm experimenting with a bunch of different personal soldering techniques and I'd worried that lead-free would be more limiting but so far nope. |
| lukego:
Today I soldered a ground pad on a small 4 layer PCB using lead-free solder, both with an iron to deposit solder and then with hot air to reflow. It was hard work (with a preheater cranked up below too) and I'm not convinced that it actually worked out yet! This exact same chip/board is child's play with 63/37 which flows like melted butter. Definitely hard-mode with lead-free. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Previous page |