I like Gary's, apart from that, considering the heat loss and gold's relative resistance to wetting, it will help you to fill the barrel . True, with foam wicking heaps of flux up, you should be able to make it without tin, if you'd have less than 1um Au: I wouldn' even push it to 2um, on connectors. With heavy plate as you imagine you fracture the intermetalic, often magnified by the dry character of uneven heat. Agree, does not look like a big deal , but con's caught me up few times . Sounds like the ALWAYS has had a very REAL reason, down in obscure past. But Au specs DID change a lot last decade : Your 30 of millionths of an inch convert according to my maths to some 0.76 micrometre, unless I messed it up as usual; than Gary's quote would not apply; than the short answer would be NOT REALLY, Steve, give it a shot paul -----Original Message----- From: Stephen R. Gregory [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Tuesday, 1 August 2000 6:20 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [TN] Pre-tinning... 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 ############################################################## ############################################################## 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 ##############################################################