Hi Technos, I have an intriguing one. I find passive components that are not soldered at one end after reflow. These components show very good joints at one extremity while the other end is not soldered at all. The not soldered end is usually outside of the pad, at the mercy of the surface tension, but sometimes it touches the respective pad, being untouched by the solder, that forms nice bumps on the pad. We're on no-clean paste, the board finish is ENIG. The assembly has being running for a long time, we built tenths of thousands without this problem. But all of a sudden... The problem appears randomly, not always on the same component, not always at the same place. The frequency is let's say one occurence every 50 boards. The assembly is not so populated, barely about 50 parts. I checked the insertion, it is good. I even offset manually some parts before the reflow, but got good soldering on them. The reflow profile is the same, I even ran the profiler. The paste is OK, good date code, same printing conditions, paste height OK. The land patterns are adequate, they haven't changed. First, my instinct told me it's the parts, maybe they're too old. I checked the reels and the manufacturer's date codes (not the broker's) are between mid 2000 until june 2001. Not that old, are they? What could it be? The board? What and how to check, since the pads are very well wet? The parts? Anything else? Thanks for any input, Ioan --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet To temporarily halt delivery of Technet send the following message: SET Technet NOMAIL Search previous postings at: www.ipc.org > On-Line Resources & Databases > E-mail Archives Please visit IPC web site (http://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm) for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------