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Making Sense of Wave Soldering
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Making Sense of Wave Soldering
Depending on component technology, many options exist for automated mass soldering today. But wave soldering was the first – and, for several decades, only – practical method for quickly soldering large numbers of components to printed circuit boards (“PCBs,” also known as printed wiring boards or “PWBs” because their tracks or traces replaced actual wires previously needed to connect components).Get more news about Wave Soldering,you can vist our website!
Depending on component technology, many options exist for automated mass soldering today. But wave soldering was the first – and, for several decades, only – practical method for quickly soldering large numbers of components to printed circuit boards (“PCBs,” also known as printed wiring boards or “PWBs” because their tracks or traces replaced actual wires previously needed to connect components).
For the first decade of my life, our home telephone did not have buttons or even a dial. We picked up the receiver and asked a human to make the call. (Our home number was 399J.) Today, my phone is vastly more powerful and flexible than the mainframe computer on which I learned programming.
My first soldering job involved soldering wires to arrays of sockets. Components that looked like incandescent lightbulbs plugged into the sockets to make things like AM radios. There were a lot of people doing soldering in that factory and, as far as I can remember, no soldering machines.
One of the first units of the solid state mainframe computer (the IBM System/360) that changed the world arrived at my undergraduate university in time for my sophomore year. Commands and data were input with punch cards. Tape reels stored the data. Computer usage was by appointment only (and charged by the minute). We dropped off our cards and returned at the appointed time to retrieve the printouts from one of the dozens of techs required just to keep the system running. And this was the machine that would change the world!
I bought my first “pocket” calculator in 1972 for $350 (equivalent to a bit more than $2,000 today). It could perform the basic four functions (and nothing more) yet seemed worth every penny of its now absurd cost. My local drugstore was selling more powerful calculators for less than $6 not long ago.
Forty-odd years ago, I worked at a company that made the first word processors. They were the size of a closet, stored data on 10” floppy discs and cost as much as a Mercedes 450S. About five years later, personal computers not much larger than a mechanical typewriter handled word processing better than the original dedicated machines but cost about 80% less.
Around 1998, an electronics engineering professor of an esteemed university told me in all seriousness that the Pentium 4 processor was so advanced that there would never be applications requiring more power. That chip became obsolete within about 18 months.
In recent years, I have encountered synthetic humans so thoroughly lifelike that they are used for training surgeons. Pocket-size devices are close to performing real-time translation between very different languages. GPS has worked so well for so long that an entire generation has grown up without needing to use a map. And those incandescent lightbulbs that looked a lot like the vacuum tubes that I was soldering 60 years ago disappeared from stores about a decade ago, replaced for the most part by LED electronics.
In my lifetime, then, the world has reached the point where we would have a hard time getting by without electricity and electronics. It only takes a brief failure of the electric grid to prove we are utterly dependent on the movement of electrons.
The transformation in technology has been amazing and we quite rightly marvel at the remarkable components and assemblies that make this life possible. But the remarkable components are useless without solder – the same material used at least since Edison – to complete the circuit. Soldering is not as thrilling as new product development but it’s the very heart of electronics. And, even though we’ve soldered electronics since the 1800’s, the most common problems in electronics still involve getting solder everywhere it’s needed and only where it’s needed without damaging components.
Soldering is often described as an art. And that’s where the problems begin because soldering is all about science. Most soldering problems are easily preventable with understanding of the physical forces that control solder’s behavior.