I am forwarding this question from one of the design engineers at work.  We
advertise we build class 3 products, but with all of our thick boards, we
get open traces whenever a hand soldering operation is required.  We just
found out that one of our board vendors has been removing all the unused
pads on the inner layers without out knowledge.  The board type we generally
use for our backplanes is type 3c per IPC-2222.

Does getting rid of unused pads on all inner layers have any profound affect
on the PHT barrel integrity especially with high layer count / thick circuit
boards?

Thanks for your help,

Gary Bremer
Manufacturing Engineer
Phone (626) 449-3090 ext. 219