Jeff, Appreciate you time, input, and empathy. This story certainly is not new but keeps getting more interesting and complex with time. I'm held accountable by my CM's if the solder joints do not meet IPC requirements. Ok, but I'm not able to directly correlate design guidelines with acceptance criteria in IPC requirement - not guidelines especially now that DoD has adopted and, essentially, validated the specifications - not guidelines. Werner serves as chair on three committees and co chair on some more, I guess. The committees are composed of leaders in our industry putting forth great stuff as I said before concerning design for reliability. Component suppliers make up their rules as well. All I'm saying is there is a gap and it seems to be getting wider especially for one or two man/woman design teams tempted to go whichever way the wind blows whem enticed on a particlular day. Granted, there is much "slop" for forgiving designs, and the boards, components, and assemblies representing them. However, with things going in the obvious direction, as smaller/denser, something needs more attention and less emotion as your greatly accepted empathy. Still, for my young design team, I'm going all the way with IPC until proven wrong, or not. Earl --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest Search the archives of previous posts at: http://listserv.ipc.org/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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------