Hi ya'll!

We've got a board here that we're going to be assembling that is transferring 
from one of our other plants. They sent us a "Gold Board" so that we could 
look at it and have it in front of us to help when we write the work 
instructions.

It's a all PTH board and quite large. All along one edge of the board there 
are these right-angle headers. They're from FCI/Berg and gold plated. 

I noticed on the "Gold Board" it looked like they had been pre-tinned. I 
hadn't ever seen that before. I went back to the stockroom and checked the 
parts we had back there, and the whole header was gold plated. I called our 
sister plant and asked if they pre-tinned the headers before installing them. 
They said they did. I asked is this something the customer requested and they 
said no, but that it was something you ALWAYS did when you are dealing with 
gold plated parts...

I went to FCI's web page to see how much gold was plated on them, but I 
couldn't find the exact part there (they're still updating the web page with 
part numbers since they bought Berg). But the gold plating thickness that I 
read on the page with similar parts was either 30-µin., or 15-µin...that 
doesn't seem to me like there's enough there to worry about gold 
embrittlement, especially with a PTH joint...

Do we REALLY need to pre-tin these things?

Thanks!

-Steve Gregory-

##############################################################
TechNet Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c
##############################################################
To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in
the body:
To subscribe:   SUBSCRIBE TECHNET <your full name>
To unsubscribe:   SIGNOFF TECHNET
##############################################################
Please visit IPC web site (http://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm) for additional
information.
If you need assistance - contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or
847-509-9700 ext.5315
##############################################################