"Smitty Two" wrote in message
news
In article ,
"Arfa Daily" wrote:

I HATE
lead-free with a passion.

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 ****ty practices than
to the abandonment of lead.

But actually Smitty, it amounts to the same thing, doesn't it ? The cost of
consumer electronic equipment is so low, as has been dictated by the market,
that some ****ty practices have to prevail to meet those price points. The
thing is that with leaded solder, those ****ty practices that were
solder-related, could be got away with. With lead-free, they can't, so we
are now seeing equipment which manages to conform to the price constraints,
but can't make it any more, in the reliability stakes.

As to the current formulations being better than earlier ones, I'm not sure
that there is actually any difference. Mixes with additional metals to try
to improve the 'workability' of the stuff have been there right from the
start. It's just that they were too expensive to be practical. I guess for
manufacturing quantities, this is no longer the case, and this has
undoubtedly led to an improvement in joint integrity. For sure, lead-free
joints now at least look a bit better than they did, but I am still seeing
many more bad joints on in-warranty, or just out of warranty items, than I
ever did when leaded solder prevailed.

No matter how it's dressed up, the stuff just isn't as good for the job *all
round* as leaded solder was. It has replaced a mature and reliable
technology that had evolved into a process as near perfect as it could be,
with one that at best is a 'next best thing' compromise, and to what benefit
? None that actually stands up to scrutiny in the real world. It was a
politically green agenda fuelled by the hysterical rubbish that gets spouted
about both the real and imagined dangers of lead in the environment, that
lead to the situation that we now have.

Arfa