Hey ya'll! Well, it's cooled down to a balmy 90-degrees here, and boy are my sweat glands happy!...hehehe But email ain't to talk about my how much I perspire, but about changing cultures. One of my "opportunities" as presented to me here is figuring out how to reduce costs (aren't we all trying to do that?). One of the things that I've noticed since I've been here, is that there is that everything is looked at through MIL-SPEC shaded glasses...and I've found that boards we were building under IPC 610 class-II standards were being touched-up un-neccessarily. Things that are maybe only a process indicator, but acceptable, are being reworked. For one example, dull solder joints that were caused because an active OA flux was left on longer than it should have been before cleaning has made the joints look dull. QA won't accept the board until all the solder joints are sparkling. I'll fix the problem about the operators leaving the flux on too long before washing the board, but you still don't need to touch every joint up! But I sure couldn't convince QA of that...and so on it goes. Part of the history here is that they've always done MIL-SPEC work here, and a lot of that work isn't as plentiful as it once was. One reason I fully believe is because of the costs associated with building product to that level of quality. At my last company we built product that was going on the space shuttle, but yet it only needed to meet 610 Class-II standards. It wasn't any guidance stuff or anything like that, but even NASA is relaxing things a bit. Class-II product is something new here, and I think I'm gonna have my hands full trying to get people out of that MIL-SPEC culture...it'll be hard to make any money doing things that way with the difference in the margins between MIL-SPEC and commercial class-II product.. Any suggestions anybody? Thanks ya'll! -Steve Gregory- ############################################################## TechNet Mail List 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://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm) for additional information. If you need assistance - contact Gayatri Sardeshpande at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5365 ##############################################################