Bill,

     This reminds of something a crusty ol' quality manager once told me a
while back; "If you have to sit and stare at something for more than just a
few seconds to decide if it's good or not, it's probably good..." , and that's
usually a very true statement.

      My take on this is, if you can see solder coming up at least 75% of
barrel, and you don't see any problems on the bottomside, then I wouldn't lose
any sleep over it. Yeah, if know that you probably have to deal with somebody
that's taking the criteria exactly word-for-word and beating you over the head
with it...but then again, maybe not.

       I've run across a few boards in the past that had kinda' the same
problem. The situation was not unlike yours, beautiful bottomside joints,
topside for the most part was good too, but there was always few joints that
didn't seem to fill very good. I tweaked the profile a little in the wave
solder, and seemed to improve things, but occasionally the was the same
minimum barrel fill. After looking at things a little more, the problem was
happening on certain pins, on certain IC's. To make a long story short, the
problem was with the ground pins on the devices, they went into a ground plane
and weren't thermally relieved...I verified this by looking at the gerbers for
the board. The ground plane was acting as a heatsink and freezing the solder
before it came to the top of the board. Maybe your boards are giving you the
same problem?

                                                    -Steve Gregory-

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