That fact alone is why I have adopted a note stating that nothing on the board is to change unless approved. Some manufacturers like doing

that sort of business. You do get opens with thick boards with pads removed? Lets compare. I do some .125" boards with only external pads

at times at least one board is hand soldered. I haven't had that problem....yet.

When working at the board house I had heard of this type of problem, but let me ask what your plating (hole wall) thickness is?

I'm not say you have a problem, I just wan't to define the limits to avoid this problem. I would think that best practice is having a pad, at

least every .100". I guess the problem become worse as you get towards the center of the board.

What is your spin on this occurrence?

 

CR

 

 

 I am forwarding this question from one of the design engineers at work.  We advertise we build class 3 products, but with all of our thick boards, we get open traces whenever a hand soldering operation is required.  We just found out that one of our board vendors has been removing all the unused pads on the inner layers without out knowledge.  The board type we generally use for our backplanes is type 3c per IPC-2222.

Does getting rid of unused pads on all inner layers have any profound affect on the PHT barrel integrity especially with high layer count / thick circuit boards?

Thanks for your help,

Gary Bremer
Manufacturing Engineer
Phone (626) 449-3090 ext. 219