While I agree that in the Town of Perfect, none of these outside lotions would be in the manufacturing area, but while Cedar Rapids is close to Perfect, we ain't there. I could see a huge fight on my hands, especially with the unions, if we tried to prohibit all such materials, even from women's handbags. I think the key element to consider is how much of the ionic or non-ionic material actually gets transferred to the assembly. I have had customers come unglued when they come into our facility and handling assemblies without gloves. They have calmed down when I explain that we have that big Aquastorm just before conformal coating that cleans off the hand residues and we handle with clean bags and gloved hands until the boards are coated. This is what makes me wonder if this is much ado about nothing. Last summer, when Cedar Rapids had the massive flooding, we lost three of the four major municipal wells. To avoid water rationing measures, the city asked everyone to voluntarily cut as much water usage as possible. Rockwell put gallon jugs of hand sanitizer into all rest rooms to avoid water in the sinks. Amazing how much that saves. I don't recall any quality problems from the floor, such as loss of adhesion of coating or adhesives, failures in test, etc, during the 3 weeks this was in effect. We have fielded product over the last year and nothing has arisen that would be traced to the use of these items. So again, do I worry too much? Doug Pauls Rockwell Collins [log in to unmask] 06/19/2009 02:54 PM To "TechNet E-Mail Forum" <[log in to unmask]>, <[log in to unmask]> cc Subject RE: [TN] Hand Sanitizers Round 2 Doug, I had the same question asked of me by a sister facility recently... While I do not know of any recent research on current hand lotions, my take on it is to ban all lotions from the shop floor. In a prior life, if an operator's hands got dirty, they were instructed to leave the work center and wash their hands. Some operators would go to a "Wet Lab" which was adjacent to the manufacturing shop to wash their hands in an emergency situation. I would be very cautious about putting anything in the shop to clean operators' hands. Hand lotions can leave ionic and non-ionic contamination and residues on the hardware, which can make the cleaning processes less efficient. Now if somebody has the bucks to spend on this subject, I'm sure that it can be arranged. Enjoy your Mountain Dew this weekend... Lee Whiteman, PMP Senior Member Engineering Staff L-3 Communications East Telephone: (856) 338-3508 FAX: (856) 338-2906 E-Mail: [log in to unmask] -----Original Message----- From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Douglas Pauls Sent: Friday, June 19, 2009 3:46 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [TN] Hand Sanitizers Round 2 Good afternoon all. I hesitate to ask this on a Friday afternoon, but here goes. Back in April, we had a Technet conversation about hand sanitizers and possible effects on electronic assemblies. I just re-read the thread from the archives. There was a lot of speculation about the effectiveness of these items from a bacteriological perspective, some about the chemicals from Karen Tellefsen, but nothing really related specifically to known failure mechanisms of these materials or studies that have been done. I was not as concerned about this until I started looking harder in our facility. I have found that there are several hand sanitizers here with dyes and fragrances. Germ-X makes a green hand sanitizer with apple fragrance, called Gnarly Green Apple. I would love to spec that material in here purely for the reason that it would be the first known use of "gnarly" in a Rockwell spec. I wonder if the dyes are an issue or the fragrances (usually oils). I was just in a meeting discussing this with a number of leaders in various manufacturing areas. We also have concerns about hand lotions coming into the facilities in ladies purses and being used because they don't like the smell of the approved ones we have from Chemtronics or Techspray. We have the big safety net in our facility of a saponified aqueous water wash process just prior to conformal coating, and everything handled with gloves thereafter, but the intermediate steps where we might have solderability issues or residues that might cause a high voltage power supply to fail in ICT, have me wondering. So, I ask the question if anyone in the Technet community knows of any scientific study examining the transfer of hand sanitizer chemicals, or hand lotion chemicals, to an electronic assembly and / or the detrimental effects of such residues. I can't believe that I am the first to ask the question and am wondering if someone else has already done an analysis so I don't have to re-invent the wheel. Doug Pauls Rockwell Collins --------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 15.0 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 or (re-start) delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL or (MAIL) 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/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-615-7100 ext.2815 ----------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 15.0 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 or (re-start) delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL or (MAIL) 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/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-615-7100 ext.2815 -----------------------------------------------------