Hi John!! Like Kathy said, magnification for inspection is spelled out in the 610, and the J-STD too...I would quote them, but I don't have them in front of me...I do know 30X is pushing things a whole lot! This issue is a never ending debate. Are your inspectors finding REAL defects? I go through this stuff quite a bit too...so I understand your frustrations. An ol' crusty QA manager told me a while back, is that there are two kinds of inspectors, those that inspect to accept, and those that inspect to reject. He also said that if it takes more than just a couple of seconds to decide if something is good or bad, it's probably good...leave it alone. I go through this stuff all the time...especially with class-II stuff here. The latest battle has been with barrel-fill. You're allowed a 75% barrel fill with class-II stuff... The inspectors complain that they can't tell if it's 74% or 76%, so they reject everything that doesn't have a full barrel fill...(where's my Excedrin?). In turn, this just conditions all our operators to touch-up things that they don't need to touch-up...and it goes on and on, and on, and on... Have tried to talk to them about the issues when re-heating solder joints, (intermetallics, and that it's NOT increasing the functionality or reliability of the joints). But it's like like I'm talking to a wall. Inspectors, as you have learned, need to feel that they must find something...I've only met a few inspectors that I can hand a board to, and get it back without red-arrows on it somewhere...whether there is defects on it or not. That's their job (in their mind), to find something wrong...if they can't find something wrong, then they've missed something, and not done their job... If it sounds like I'm getting down on inspectors, I'm really not. There's been more than just a few times in my career that I was really glad that there was a very detailed, picky, inspector, that caught a mistake from production that was pretty serious before we shipped to the customer...stuff happens. But on the other hand, there has been times that they've been so focused on solder joints, that they've totally missed that there were components installed, that were wrong values, wrong polarity, etc... I'm not saying that you need a QA inspector to tell you when you load something wrong, that responsibilty should fall squarely on the set-up and first article inspection from the people that are running the line, but you know what I'm driving at... -Steve Gregory-