Paper burns at 451° F (~233° C). Ray Bradbury decided to title one of his novels after this temperature.
Solder melt at 370° F (~188° C). No one titled a novel after this temperature, and the reason is pretty obvious: it isn’t always true.
The most common solder was, when I was small and Xmas trees were tall (Bee Gees anyone?), the alloy made of tin and lead.
More precicely, the alloy made 60% from tin and 40% from lead.
It was cheap, it was good, it was easy to use for the average electronic use, that is building a circuit from scratch or repair a factory-made device (they used more or less the same alloy).
Now we are tall, and Xmas trees are small (“First of May”, by The Bee Gees) and lead is nowhere to be seen anymore. Not in gasoline, nor in solder alloys used in factory-made devices.
The problem is that when a component (maybe a SMD) is soldered on the ground plane of the circuit board with a ROHS-compliant solder, not even 896° F (~480° C) are able to melt the d**n thing!
I will make d**n sure not to buy any ROHS-compliant solder for the following decades.
Bye
Categories: electronic ,howtos