Steve, Do you use this organic acid flux throughout the whole process? Reflow, wave, hand solder, etc? We have quite the opposite problem of most of your counterparts - we are PLAGUED with Customer directed board suppliers that constantly give us bad boards. Couple that with the parts that come from a zillion suppliers, and we have chronic opportunities for SOMETHING to come up with solderability problems. (We are a quite large contract manufacturer of PWAs) If we could go to a cure-all type flux, maybe I could spend a little more time doing PROACTIVE Quality Engineering instead of REACTIVE. Sigh - pipe dream, I know. Jan Pelchat ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Re: [TN] Fab Solderability Test @ Assembly house Author: "Stephen R. Gregory" <[log in to unmask]> at 0UTG0ING Date: 9/22/98 4:35 PM In a message dated 9/22/98 11:02:04 AM Pacific Daylight Time, [log in to unmask] writes: << Dear Technetters, Recently, we faced a solderability problem on our fab. I have the following questions for assembly houses. (1) How many assembly houses perform solderability test using solder-sample fab? (2) Is there any information as how effective this test is? I mean any lot went bad still after doing solderability test (at assembly house). My management wants to know the overall industry trend and effectiveness of the test to make decision. re, Ken Patel Hi Ken! This is the fifth contract assembly company I've worked for, and the only time I ever did solderability tests were with boards from a turnkey account that were drop shipped to us...and only then because the customer wanted us to to satisfy their procedures. I'll speak for myself, but I think I'm not a whole different than anybody else in this regard. We're water soluble because we can't always count on getting nice solderable PCB's and parts in the consigned kits that we get. It's kinda' like what your mom used to tell you when you were a little kid; "Don't put that in your mouth, you don't know where that's been!" ...it's the same thing with the parts and PCB's, I don't know where they've been (but I won't try and put them in my mouth either), so that's why we use an active organic acid flux that'll almost solder to dirt. If I were to do solderability tests and find something that might look like it'll give me problems, and then go to the G.M. and tell him that we can't start a kit because I found some fabs that don't pass a solderability test, I'd get told to find some stronger flux because in a contract assembly environment once the materials hit the recieving dock, the clock starts ticking, and you've got to get the assemblies built whatever it takes... That's really not as foolhardy as it might seem, because it's been longer than I can remember since I've run across any real solderability issues with PCB's, but parts are a different story. I've talked with a few of my Bud's that work at other companies who do solderabilty testing, and they say that 99.9% of the time they're testing fabs that are good...so much so that they are thinking of dropping the requirement altogether, and only using a solderability test to verify problems that may be discovered on the floor since the incidents are so few and far between... -Steve Gregory- ################################################################ 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's web site (http://www.ipc.org) "On-Line Services" section for additional information. For technical support contact Hugo Scaramuzza at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.312 ################################################################ ################################################################ 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's web site (http://www.ipc.org) "On-Line Services" section for additional information. For technical support contact Hugo Scaramuzza at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.312 ################################################################