Hi Jon - If you check out my website (www.ITM-SMT.com) under "Articles", you will see an article I did on Reflow of Through-hole (Intrusive Reflow). Hope this helps. Regarding design guidelines for fine-pitch - I recommend Vern Solberg's design guideline book as well as Jim Blankenhorn's (from SMTPlus). But if you have a solderball problem, there can be a dozen causes other than the stencil aperture. Improper reflow profile, bad solder paste, are among the myriad of causes of solder balls. Bridging is the same - check out the stencil design but be more concerned about the solder paste and printing process and printer parameters. With the MELF, there is an aperture design that is somewhat "U" shaped that cradles the MELF in the solder paste. Your stencil designer should know about this. Hope this helps. Phil Zarrow ITM, Inc. Durham, NH USA www.ITM-SMT.com ################################################################ 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 technical support contact Hugo Scaramuzza at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.312 ################################################################