Today's Lead Free Crap Solder Stories ...

For technicians in the consumer goods/home entertainment repair industry, the present situation can be defined as BOHICA.

Manufacturers haven't been soldering consumer goods properly for decades, and I agree with your summary, that with lead-free, it's going to get much worse. I'm sure some are thinking: Opportunity. No, not when the owner can buy a new one for less than a repair job.

Did anyone own a RCA Thomson(?) TV of the 90s that didn't fail within two years? The CTC77 type, for a few series with bad tuner shield soldering, where the shield was used for needed circuit continuity.

Even so, much earlier, many types of electronic gear failures were a result of soldering faults/failures.

There was a SER post years ago titled something like; why can't manufacturers solder?

Apparently the company accountants were in charge of the speed control of the track feed as the boards passed thru the solder wave bath, it seems. At double speed, they could potentially save tens-of-thousands of dollars in solder purchasing costs per year.. or something similar.

As any techs with some years of experience have seen countless times, larger components that can dissipate more heat during the soldering phase of manufacturing rarely get soldered properly.

Automation in board fabrication was a huge advancement in electronic manufacturing, but that wasn't satisfactory for the accountant/profits-driven manufacturing model.

The Chinese have taken nearly every manufacturing process to a whole 'nother lower level, even before lead-free. It's disgusting that the American and other countries' consumers keep buying this shiney new worthless crap, with much of it being put out for trash pickup within a year.. year after year (and paying to have it hauled away). Undoubtedly, many career positions available in waste management.

Get used to the likelyhood that any vacant land will become landfill pits.. who knows, maybe even our national parks. When the groundwater aquafers are nearly totally fuctup, a fleet of space shuttles can start hauling it away. Where's the koolaid line form? I wanna be at the front of the line (if I even last much longer).

All of this low grade crap manufactured today should be imported only with a Return to Sender Free agreement. Let them dispose of all this worthless crap.. and I'm fairly sure they would, and sell it again as recycled, but fresh, new products.

I try to buy older stuff that was manufactured to a slightly higher level of quality, which may at least be repairable. Anymore, I only repair my own stuff, or a limited number of items that I want to, for a few close friends.

What's taken place, I think, which I suspect was intentionally forced upon most of us, is that manufacturers wanted to lower everyone's expectations of quality. With that accomplished, all they need to do is make sure there are shelves full of new crap to replace the old crap with.

How many times has someone been heard saying; I'll never buy that brand again, next time I'll buy a (different brand)? Catch 22.. it's nearly all the same, in retail stores, anyway. Before they know it, they choose another product from the same brand name they started with.. and round 'n round it goes.

-- Cheers, WB .............

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I'm thinking of making a tug-test tool for PbF checking. Probably based on an automatic centre punch tool latch mechanism but somehow inverted in operation. How many ounces or grams of pullout tension do you think a 1/3 W resistor lead/wire link/TO92 wire should resist pulling out , leaded solder that is.

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

I would have thought pretty much to the wire breaking point. How many times have you hooked a screwdriver or whatever, under a component in order to unsolder one end, then heated the joint on the other side of the board, whilst applying pressure to the link / component, only to then have it snap on you, because you were heating the joint next to the one you were supposed to be ... :-)

Arfa

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One problem is ,for likes of TO92 and standardised tug , the use of surgical artery forceps to grip before pulling, too much grip force and you squash the lead. I just tried with a board and counter weights on kitchen scales and I would say I use about 1Kg of tug with thin nose pliers, pulling perpendicular to the pcb.

What date was the VOX ? I've previously found 2 ,tug test failing, loose links due to PbF on a 2005 Vox AC30 , AC30CC2X . Found in passing as otherwise in for valve and intrusive tremolo initiated rumble

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

I would have thought pretty much to the wire breaking point. How many times have you hooked a screwdriver or whatever, under a component in order to unsolder one end, then heated the joint on the other side of the board, whilst applying pressure to the link / component, only to then have it snap on you, because you were heating the joint next to the one you were supposed to be ... :-)

Arfa

______________________

yep, done that!

Colin

:)

Come to think of it, lead free solder and volcanic ash look very similar.

Ron

Shouldn't be a problem. How often are F-15s dumped in landfills?

Hi!

Well, if lead free solder causes failures, and as a result one crashes...what's to stop the site from being a landfill?

William

"Arfa Daily" wrote in news:mdlJn.18479$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe29.ams:

most of the time,when you have an intermittent,if you tap it,you end up working the joint to a better connection and you don't see the intermittent. you have to leave it alone and wait patiently for the IM to show up,then lightly tap around to find the area most sensitive.

"William Sommerwerck" wrote in news:ht61dl$i4s$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:

there's a guy who bought a scrapped,"demilled" T-38,with a cracked airframe,he owned a aircraft maintenance shop and was able to restore it to flight condition,and he has the only civilian,flyable T-38 jet. It's the trainer version of the F-5 fighter,the "Mig 28" in Top Gun.

I've been watching this "trend" since the '70s.

My opinion is that we as consumers have brought this on ourselves with the attitude of: "I don't care if it's crap, I want it now, I want it cheap and I'll be bored with it within a year anyway."

Although this isn't entirely new. You could be cheap or shoddy merchandise for as long as they've been bartering from stuff. It's just that the ability to mass produce garbage has exceeded our wildest expectations.

Jeff

I think that's only half the truth. I was born in 1947, and the rate of technological change is at least five to ten times what it was 50 years ago. ICs and SMTs, inserted by robots, make possible the "cheap" electronics that can be easily discarded to make room for the next quarter's spasm of improvements.

It was a Vox Valvetronix combo - one of those things with the built in digital amp simulator that purports to make it sound like an AC30, or an AC15, or a Tweed or a 70's Brit amp or an 80's Brit amp, or a dustbin full of marbles or whatever. I didn't take much notice of what year, but the board was marked with a PbF symbol. It last crossed my bench two years ago almost to the day, when the owner had me fit a buffered variable level line out to the back panel, so at least 2008 and probably a bit before that.

Arfa

Cracker, Ron ! LOL !! :-)))

Arfa

I don't doubt your experiences, and of course this isn't your first rant about lead-free. I think the early lead-free formulas were inherently bad, but I think some of the new ones are pretty damn good. I don't mind working with them at all, and find the "solderability" to be on a par with lead.

I still use a lot of lead, but some of my customers (who sell to Europe) specify lead-free. We use Sn96.5Ag3Cu0.5 and have been well-satisfied with it. I tend to agree with Wild Bill, that manufacturing has been turned over to the bean-counters, and that the quality issues you're seeing with consumer products may be due more to shitty practices than to the abandonment of lead.

Traditionally Jim, I would agree with you for bad joints on leaded solder. They are predictable, well behaved in terms of tap sensitivity and sensitivity to heat and cold and board flexing, but above all, for the most part, readily visible. Lead-free bad joints seem to exhibit no such tendencies. Their auto-failure and self-recovery often seem to bear no fixed relationship to temperature, time or the way in which they are disturbed. The Vox was a good example of that.

It might be argued that the changing of the mature leaded soldering technology, that was pretty much taped down in terms of 'goodness' of joints and reliability, for the lead-free technolgy which has taken us back 40 years to the early days of PCB production in terms of reliability, has been good for the trade because of it bringing more work through the door. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case. Whereas I would expect to be able to find and correct a bad joint on a leaded solder board in a maximum of 15 minutes from putting the item on the bench, with a lead-free bad joint, I might finish up spending an hour or more on frustrating blanket reworks of whole areas of joints, using half a reel more of the hateful stuff, because conventional ways of finding the bad joints no longer work.

If I then tried to charge a proper living wage hourly rate for the job, the owners would never come back to pick the item up, instead spending their hard-earned on the latest bigger / better / shinier / cheaper offering from China ...

Lead-free solder is making items fail much more than they need to, and rendering repair uneconomic, leading to more equipment scrapping and, with the best recycling will in the world, more items going to landfill. I wonder if all the narrow minded inward thinking ecobollox merchants had this in mind when they came up with their wonderful idea of mandating the use of lead-free solder as part of their 'save the planet' religion ?

Arfa

What happened before the 70's? It's not like designed obsolescence is anything new. Auto manufacturers were doing that since WWII where you were expected to buy a new car every two years.

Yep. Blame the victims.

It's really a self fulfilling mechanism. Today's consumers simply assume that everything they buy is junk and will blow up immediately after the warranty expires. Why bother paying for quality when literally everything falls apart or blows up overnight? The only thing the vendors can compete on is price, resulting in very small differences in price that can kill or make a product. That also results in cutting every corner possible, including shoddy soldering, bitter edge component selection, and designed to fail component selection.

What seems to be happening is the demise of hand soldering. In the distant past, it was somewhat traditional to solder mask the large physical parts, which acted as a heat sink, during wave soldering, and hand solder them in "touch-up". Component manufacturers have made heroic attempts to design components that can be properly wave soldered, but they tend to be expensive. So, to cut costs, manufacturers seem to be running everything through wave soldering or vapor reflow soldering machines, including parts that are really are too massive. Touch-up is eliminated as is burn-in and QA. If it blows up, by the time the customer returns it, the next generation of products will be available. That actually worked with tin-lead solder, but is failing with RoHS solder. The problem seems to be (i.e. my opinion) that tin-silver solder has a narrower range of working temperatures than tin-lead. The large physical components that were previously soldered by hand, simply suck away too much heat when soldered, resulting in a cold solder joint.

Yeah, but you probably couldn't afford it if everything were quality merchandise.

Anyway, cease complaining. Your test equipment collection is about the same age as mine and belongs in a museum. It is possible to build reliable and long life electronics. Just don't expect that from consumer electronics.

My suspicion it is more to do with tinpest rather than lead free solder. A layer of 100 percent tin tinning of all leads. Often on removing failed joints , by pulling, not desoldering, you can see the dusty grey surface of presumably tinpest . Then volume change (27 percent ?) to the tinpest allotrope of tin and its insulation rather than conduction causes the electrical break. Mismatch thermal expansion coefficients don't seem t be problematic