Neil, I am curious about your reply because I am looking at v-score as a means to panelize some boards. How were you separating the boards? I can see problems if the boards were being broken apart by hand, but were you using a cab or FKN type of separator amd getting failures? Thanks. Bob Robert Barr Manufacturing Engineering Formation, Inc. -----Original Message----- From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Neil Atkinson Sent: Monday, October 08, 2001 4:24 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [TN] Leaky Capacitors I have seen this in the past and you must be very careful during de-panellising PCBs as well. We banned 'v' scoring of FR4 surface mount PCBs because of the risk of cracking surface mount capacitors. The time to failure can be anything from hours to months depending on environment - temperature, moisture etc. I have another question - has anybody out there seen chip capacitors fail open circuit when operated in a circuit which runs quite hot? Can the end caps become loose through temperature cycling causing the capacitors to go open circuit at elevated temperatures? Neil --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------