Steve

It is very difficult to make a decision for you, here, without carefully inspecting the
whys and the wherefores. I agree you make an a priori case but will your RMA boards
clean up well enough using saponifier cleaning. As always, you must run qualification
tests **under production conditions** before you can decide.

I have a client who ran "no-clean" and water-soluble in parallel and he recently
decided to rationalise by finding something that would clean his "no-clean". After
trials, he hit on the latest generation saponifier, made by a German company, which
seemed to do the job. He bought a specially built module that integrated into his
high-throughput aqueous batch cleaner (up to 10 m2 of PCBs/hour). Initial production
trials gave ionic contamination readings of 0,1 to 0,15 ug/cm2 eq. NaCl, which ain't
bad, at all. He needs the flexibility of batch cleaning to give desired results because
some of his products go into aircraft jet engines and he must have as near perfection
as possible. The saponifier has a high solvent proportion and a milder amine than the
usual monoethanolamine. If you wish, I can e-mail you privately a PDF document
concerning the process.

Now, your combination and requirements are different (you don't mention your
throughput) but it is possible that something similar may help you as I feel reasonably
confident that it could handle RMA flux/paste almost as well (provided tests proved
hand soldering/retouch residues were OK).

FWIW

Brian

"Stephen R. Gregory" wrote:

> Hi ya'll!
>
> Just brainstorming a bit...when you have two different flux processes, what
> do ya'll think makes most sense, have two different and separate cleaning
> systems, or have one system that will cover both?
>
> Precisely; we do both RMA and water soluble, and have two different cleaners
> here... an Electrovert MCS-1000 for our RMA boards (which is basically a
> fancy batch cleaner) , and a old Hollis Polyclean for our water soluble stuff.
>
> I'm thinking that if we had the type of cleaner that would cover all the
> different types of residues would be more cost effective than having two
> separate cleaners. Sure, there would be saponification used (or some other
> type of process to clean RMA residues that wouldn't be necessary when
> cleaning water soluble flux residues) but still, wouldn't that make more
> sense than trying to support two separate cleaners?
>
> Does anybody else do this? Do any of ya'll use one cleaner that does it all?
> Is it cost effective? I know it depends on the percentage of boards that are
> RMA vs. water soluble...I would estimate our percentages are about
> 50/50...with the percentages increasing towards water soluble...don't think
> that we'll ever consider no-clean anytime in the near future, it's just the
> nature of our business...
>
> As usual, thanks ya'll!
>
> -Steve Gregory-
>
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