Hi Mark, AIM's DavidS, IPC LF Listservers,

Difficult question, I think, yet I will take a first stab at it.

If you are using the alloy that contains Sb, and have reliability data to
support your applications, you would want to stay within the recommended Sb
(antimony) range that resulted in the reliability approval for your
products. Normally I would expect you are bounded by 0.3 to maybe 0.8. I am
thinking of Castin(R). Cu08Sb05Ag25Sn. I am guessing on the .8. AIM's David
if he is still reading can surely correct me.

The range (by solder pot analysis) for an alloy that purposely contained Sb
(Antimony) would be much higher than for an alloy that purposely didn't
contain Antimony.

To look for the effects visually by soldering results probably could be
done if Sb really got high in percentage like 2 or 5% or 10% yet by then
your line is shut down. The same thing would happen for high Gold, ,

Most of these tight ranges are established based on the micro structure of
the resultant joints and reliability analysis. It just isn't practical in
most electronics to wait for obvious visual effects.

Yours in Engineering, Dave
YiEngr, MA/NY DDave

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