Ryan,

I have no experience of the Datapaq profiler, but if it is a choice between
the ECD Supermole/ Waverider and KIC profiler, go for the latter.  I used
to work for a company that had a Supermole / Waverider combination,
and the waverider was garbage.  The problems that we had with the
waverider unit included :-

- Warping of the waverider carrier as it went through the solder wave,
resulting in the last contact not touching the solder wave.  Although the
last contact only appeared to be used to calculate the conveyor speed, it
screwed up all of our results.

- Battery unit would not charge properly (replaced by ECD)

- Control unit failed.  ECD said that the unit was 'overtemped', and
wanted to charge us for the repair, but we used it exactly as per the
instruction manual.  The implication was that you can only run the unit
through a wave solder machine once, then have to wait until the unit
returns to room temperature before running it through another machine.

- The coupon containing the thermocouples warped badly, and the solder
mask started to bubble and peel off after only a few uses.  Also the
thermocouples could become easily detached from the coupon (ECD has
since added strain relief clamps to prevent this from happening).

- The contacts used to measure the wave height and parallelism were
easily damaged, and I did not trust them to give accurate figures.  They
also seemed particularly susceptible to contanimation - we had to clean
the contacts after every couple of runs, despite switching the spray
fluxer off.

In short, just about everything that could go wrong with the waverider
did go wrong.  The Supermole for the reflow oven however worked OK.

The company that I currently work for has KIC profilers, which we use
only for reflow profiles. They seem to work well.

Regards,

Chris Murphy

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