Greetings:
I'm shopping for lead-free wire solders again for testing purposes. I found Kester 48 in 2005 to be the most easy to use SAC305 wire solder for hand-soldering.
It is also cored with RA, which is somewhat rare in Pb-free wires. Most Pb-free wires are being done in no-clean or water-soluble (WS). Kester is the only one with an RA SAC305 wire stocked by distributors.
It would seem WS is not very useful for many hand soldering tasks, since you can't always submerge the sort of assemblies that require hand-soldering. Picture transformers with solder lugs here.
The no-cleans are rather meek on wetting action, and only Kester 48 comes even close to the wetting of a typical SnPb fluxed solder. For those of you who haven't tried it, get some Kester 48 to tinker. It's great for tinning stranded wires since the SAC305 is less susceptable to fatigue than SnPb when tightened in a screw terminal, for instance.
What are folks using to hand-solder stuff in the RoHS land? How's it going?