Electronics > Repair

Ford Focus dashboard repair, should I use lead or leadfree solder

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Macbeth:
Use leaded by all means, but don't rely on it to cover the hairline PCB cracks. You need proper bodge wires or bridges (made of cut off through hole component legs - always worth saving!).

woodchips:
Umm, be careful. My first thing to do would be to get one of those lead solder test sticks, which will tell you what type of solder was originally used.

If leaded, then fine, go ahead.

If unleaded then the fun starts. Using leaded solder on an unleaded joint will, as scientist and eKretz say, be a mess. What seems to be the problem is that the joint ends up as a 90/10 leaded solder joint, and that amount of lead doesn't work. This is why cleaning all the old solder off is important, so that the joint is actually 60/40. Apparently you can get the same problem by simply using a leaded solder iron with lead free solder, disaster.

An alternative might be to use a small hot air pencil to reflow the joints, use a dab of flux on them as well.

Andreas:
Hello,

it is very unlikely that in 2005 any car manufacturer used unleaded solder.

Most probably the problem is at the connector.
Either outside the pcb or the connector solder joints.

with best regards

Andreas

Zepnat:
Thanks for all the advice, when the console was stripped down we could see strait away that the connector socket was dry jointed on every pin, phew! quite a relief to see such an obvious fault. Yep pretty sure they used lead solder, didn't get any weird effects when redoing the pins just nice shiny connections. Dashboards have sure changed since I was a kid.

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