Butt welding ends of 1/16" stainless wire

There have been cored-solders with fluxes for circuit board assembly which wash off completely with flowing hot water, for quite some time.. we used one type at an instrument manufacturing facility in the late 80s. Yep, they were hand-soldering thru-hole, medium density boards up to about

A stiff natural bristle brush hastened the task to be fairly effortless.. but the water needed to be hot, not just almost.

The boards I had to fix usually weren't in pristine condition and I needed a stronger flux than water-wash or no-clean. These fine-pitch packages aren't easy to remove and replace without causing some harm:

I put a coat of car wax on new white boards to make them easy to clean.

Hmm. Sounds pretty clever! When I was in the USAF, they had plexiglas dispatch boards that were edge-lit, and they used "grease pencils" to mark them; with an edge-lit board, the grease pencil shows up really well in a darkened room.

We would wipe off the grease pencil (to update the dispatch board) with a dry cloth and cigarette ashes. =:-O

Wouldn't recommend that for whiteboard, however. :-)

Cheers! Rich

Is the board tilted so "down" goes crossways over pins, or in the direction that the pins point?

That's impressive. I'd love to see a video of that.

A variation that leaves the board flat on the static mat is placing solder wick over the pins and running an iron down it. These are methods that are easier to show than describe, as they require learning to recognize and correct mistakes, like practicing welding.

jsw

You want the pins in a vertican row so the solder moves down from joint to joint.

If I can find a way to make one, I will. I don't have access to most of the tools anymore.

Jim, I started with that method, but ran into lose solder balls under ICs and heavy bridges at the back side of the pins that took too much heat to remove. I also had to scrap boards that someone else got the braid under pins and pulled the trace from the board. We had a zero tolerance for bad traces. A tiny puddle of liquid solder flows easily from one pair of pins onto the next, and takes a lot less time to do than with solder wick.

About 45 degrees; a little of both, plus about 45 degrees to Z. Think, corner of board on bench, tilted back so you're looking straight at it from your stool.

Cheers! Rich

I think good electronic techs and modelmakers are greatly under-rated and unappreciated contributors. They sure were at the corporation where I worked as an engineer, manager and research puke for many years.

I shouldn't have read this now - I just saw ST:TNG "Lower Decks," and it made me emote. Here's the ep synopsis:

And then you come up with this - I think my head is going to explode.

Thanks! Rich

Management puts us into one of two boxes:

:)

--Winston

Three boxes:

WHAT? Management actually got something correct for a change?

-- Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air... -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Being an incorrigable maverick, when I was a manager I took a different tack. I tried to promote my high-talent techs to engineering grades because their contributions deserved that level of compensation and respect. A diploma does not make one an engineer any more than a uniform makes one a soldier. Results are what count. HR about shit a brick. You can't do that, they don't have the credentials, yammer yammer. I said designing and prototyping competition-beating products and winning patents looked like qualifications to me, did they disagree and would they so advise the results-oriented VP?

Wull wull wull ...

So they came up with a parallel career path called "technologist" where the pay grades were the same as graded engineers up to a point, like warrant officers and commissioned officers, W-1 thru W-4 vs O-1 thru O-4. A W-4 Chief Warrant Officer gets the same pay as a gold oak leaf O-4 major or Navy lt cmdr. He has no command responsibility, he's a technical contributor or operator.

Transition from technician to technologist was by no means an entitlement with seniority, it had to be earned by merit and only a few did.

My little band of mavericks confounded HR and some of management because, as a group, we far exceeded all other org entities in:

percentage of non-degreed significant technical contributors corporate technical achievement awards diversity percentage of veterans percentage of members who'd won patents (all tech contributors) retention (zero voluntary turnover) projects completed on time within budget having fun at work

Then there was a re-org that involved more politics than reason and my skunkworks and I got nuked. But it lasted for 15 years and we had one hell of a good time while it lasted.

Good for you, and those involved. :)

When I first started at my last job, techs were not supposed to speak to management or engineering, unless asked a question. My second week on the job someone interrupted my work, to ask me a stupid question. I looked up and asked, Who are you? Why are you bothering me? I have work to do. He turned red and left, only to return a few minutes later with my boss. My boss was red faced and asked me, "What the hell! Why did you blow off the head of production?" I looked up and said, "So that's who he is? He was interrupting my work, and didn't identify himself. You told me that no information was to be given to anyone without knowing who and what they were." Both turned bright red, then the head of production started laughing. He admitted that he hadn't identified himself, or gave any indication of who he was. My boss was still upset, but I asked him, "Would you rather me talk to people, or work?" He just turned red again, and walked away.

I was the most productive tech there at that time. I was transferred to engineering at one point to prepare the company's most advanced design from a couple hand built prototypes, into a manufacturable product. I made design changes, wrote test procedures and built test fixtures. I had a reputation for not taking 'NO' for an answer, and doing the job right. I found out later that my boss had tried to embarrass me and get me fired when he transferred me, but it backfired. I forced manufacturing to refine their reflow process, and upgrade the rework tools with things like requesting a sample of Multicore .015" Rework solder from one of our vendors. As soon as the rework line heard about it, (I cut had some six foot pieces for each of the ladies off my spool) they marched into the ME office and demanded some for their bench. Soon, it was all over the plant. That improved solder quality, and reduced damaged traces. I went to management to complain about too many solder balls under ICs. This was caused by the typical, We've always done it that way! They were still buying the same paste solder they had started Reflow manufacturing with. The balls were for 0816 surface mount parts. Then they bought a new reflow oven that could store a profile per build. I ended up embarrassing my boss by the improvements to the entire product line.

That's a result of getting placed in 'box #2'. AMHIKT

Good on ya, Don. Sometimes intelligence and bravery are rewarded.

You can bet all your people look back on that time with great fondness and respect.

--Winston

And sometimes they merely provoke envy.