Joe, I am the wavesolder product specialist for speedline Electrovert and have been working with the Hot Air Knife for several years now. The knife does not normally cause solder balls or splashing unless it was not correctly set up and blowing solder out of the holes. The Hot Air Knife is a great tool to overcome design and layout shortcomings but as with any tool the user must have a knowledge of how to set it up to optimize the process. The knife can debridge connectors, soic's, flatpaks and a host of other areas that might bridge. If you do decide to use the air knife in your process I can also provide you with a copy of a Guide to Wavesoldering and Hot Air Knife Processing. Regards, Ken KIrby ---------------------- Forwarded by Kenneth Kirby/ElectrovertUS/Cookson on 04/20/99 10:19 AM --------------------------- (Embedded image moved "Kane Joseph" <[log in to unmask]> to file: 04/19/99 05:24 PM pic32166.pcx) To: [log in to unmask] cc: (bcc: Kenneth Kirby/ElectrovertUS/Cookson) Subject: [TN] Hot Air Knife TN'ers: We're getting a handful of bridges at wave solder on a few designs. We've tried A, B, and C, but they continue to show up consistently on some styles of connector behind chip components, and on trailing leads of flatpacks. The machines is a fairly new Electrovert with convection preheat, Lambda wave, and chip wave. We're using Sn63 at 500F with RMA 25%. We're looking at a hot air knife retrofit, which would be turned off on everything but problem boards. We've had a demo, with mixed results. Good: bridges were much improved, and no insufficients. Not-So: some frosty looking joints, which we expected, but also a lot of solder balls and splashes. We've heard that setup can be touchy, and we didn't expect to optimize on a two board sample, but we're not sure what we can conclude here. Unfortunately, the demo was not apples-to-apples - it was performed on an inerted machine with an A-type wave, and we're not sure if the splashing and balls could be attributable to the increased surface tension. Anyone out there have good things to say about their hot air knife? Joe Kane Lockheed Martin Control Systems ################################################################ 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 ################################################################