the most important thing you have to analyze is the time above reflow. Intermetallics form a thicker and thicker layer in the liquidous stage. If you minimize this time above reflow, i bet you'll see better joints. Intermetallics form bad stuff.....i.e. hard brittle Cu Sn compounds. try it out. Jason Smith lexmark Electronics [log in to unmask] Please respond to [log in to unmask]; Please respond to [log in to unmask] To: [log in to unmask] cc: (bcc: Jason Smith) bcc: Jason Smith Subject: Re: [TN] Solder Fracture Problems Steve, The boards we use are not as complex as yours but, we did have problems with warping and fractured solder connections on DIP's and gold plated components. We did a good pre-tinning on the leads and found this to help the problem. If the tinning is not good through we ended up with fractured solder connections. Hope this will help some. JL ################################################################ TechNet E-Mail Forum provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c ################################################################ To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the body: To subscribe: SUBSCRIBE TechNet <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF TechNet ################################################################ Please visit IPC web site (http://jefry.ipc.org/forum.htm) for additional information. For the technical support contact Dmitriy Sklyar at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.311 ################################################################ ################################################################ TechNet E-Mail Forum provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c ################################################################ To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the body: To subscribe: SUBSCRIBE TechNet <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF TechNet ################################################################ Please visit IPC web site (http://jefry.ipc.org/forum.htm) for additional information. For the technical support contact Dmitriy Sklyar at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.311 ################################################################