The green stuff on a PCB

[duncan303]

Hi Dave

One thing I have heard about waste oil, and I do not know if it is true. It gets hauled to the cost and loaded on a ship. Once past the twelve mile limit a valve is turned. Now it is a fuel.

AAAArggghh. Just goes to show what a massive problem it is for all of us..

My 5 Gall drum is about 1/2 full, but there are some empty 100gal barrels I could start using. Not a solution I know. maybe I am making matters worse by combining, I should look at the COSH sheets and see if I can grade the waste and maybe I should deal with the tin plating separately.

Hi Skimask

if you get lead into a lb-free environment, things get all screwy

We eventually had ROHS April last, and such a build up.... every other conference or article was about it. Now you hear practically nothing!

How did it impact me, well I tried to get my BOM lists done early at least 12 months, by the Date I only had one component NON-ROHS( subsequently designed out), which I thought was pretty damn good, it was helped by good support by suppliers, one of the first to make it easier was Farnell who is Newark for you, they seemed to be the first to allow a set global search preference of ROHS only, and then introduced "good" alternative suggestions to all search results.

Vishay amongst others caused a big problem with all its rebranding nonsense and nobody knew either where the datasheets were or verified ROHS or not, that was the biggest problem really, finding reliable alternatives.

I have sub assemblies come in from Shenzen, hands up I admit it (no choice), and they could'nt have left it closer to the mark. And I got left with a RoHS unverified order , cheers guys, hope the games go well.

I use digi-key and they have had the RoHS combo box for a long time, no doubt they will start to offer more services as the date approaches.

Having said all that, the transition appears to have been pretty smooth, still a lot of tight lipping to some subjects, a sort of wait and see policy. Who is going to get prosecuted first and exactly what for. To *******ise a quote from this forum "if anybody is actually going to appear at the door armed with anything more than a digital fridge thermometer........"

So it really comes down to two areas manufacturing vs hobby, as long as you do not place a particular product "on the market", you can do pretty much as you please, therefore all prep DFM work can be as hazardous as you wish, but you cannot sell (or in my opinion give) anything non compliant to any other person.
So making a nice enticing hobby non-rohs led flashing christmas decoration that a little baby is going to want to put in its mouthand suck, seems to still be fine.
Perhaps they should adopt the same policy for heroin addicts and just let them have as much heroin as they want, when they want, as long as the do not give it away or sell it, Big problem solved!

On the bench, lead free soldering has all its associated difficulties, at first there was no alternative. Brussels left it up to manufacturers and market demand to provide a lead free solder that people could actually use so loads and loads of test samples became available as giveaways, and it all became great copy in the periodicals. For me I have piles of samples enough to keep me going probably for years, I tend to choose any one that has the highest silver content, purely personal. But improved "solderability" is gradually being addressed in other areas, pcbs come back gold HSL etc. so by the time you have to set up to the plate things could be a little easier.

I still cannot sculpt lead-free as well as leaded (rosin and colophony free) so I may use leaded for amendment prototyping, lead-free is so fragile especially when you are adding unsupported components and the board is getting a lot of handling. Same as you Skimask any contaminated tips get relegated.

One thing I do on production boards which I haven’t seen anywhere is pre clean a length of solder with isoprop and then only handle and feed with lint free glove, my other glove is an unpowdered latex.

In the service and repair industry for goods previously on the market I recall it as being like for like, how much that is adhered to is anybodies guess, what still is unresolved is that if I want to use say a TDA series and sell it as part of an in-car product it is NON-RoHS, otherwise it is RoHS.

Generally Medical, Military and Motor are exempt. I can understand nobody really taking much notice if the tomahawk approaching you has been verified RoHS, but I do wonder about spending an hour or so inside a hot NMR scanner. Of course the motor manufacturers are exempt because……….err mmmmm….

cos we all need to err……?

Duncan

[skimask]

pre clean a length of solder with isoprop and then only handle and feed with lint free glove, my other glove is an unpowdered latex.

Exactly what they taught us in that school. You can clean the heck out of a board, clean the parts, perfect tips, and so on. Then a guy comes along and grabs that solder wire with his greasy hands and ruins everything. While I don't go as far as you do with the gloves, I do wipe down the last few inches of solder with iso before I use it.

Generally Medical, Military and Motor are exempt.

For that matter, on some things it seems like they're exempt from using solid state components...Tubes all of the place! Although I know the root reasons of why some boxes still use tubes. EMP comes to mind for one thing...