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Training & Troubleshooting Workshop Outline

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The Workshop’s content and depth are designed for your company’s immediate and long-term improvements in wave solder quality.

During your Wave Solder Training & Troubleshooting Workshop, your team will apply special principles and techniques to your own boards on your own wave machines.  Our expert trainer and proprietary curriculum will show you how to:

DAY 1 – At your wave machine and in classroom

A New Perspective On Your Process

  1. Introduction to the Solder Bond – Solder Joint Formation, Wetting
  2. Materials – Solder, Flux, Boards, Components
  3. Instrumentation – Fluxer, Air Knife, Conveyor, Preheaters, Solder Pot, Nozzle
  4. Board-Wave Interaction – Parallelism, Dwell Time and Immersion Depth, presentation includes copyrighted drawings
  5. The Relationship Between Your Wave Machine Settings and Board-Wave Interaction – Review of wave machine settings as compared to board-wave, fluxer and temp data
  6. How to Ensure that Your Boards are Parallel to Your Wave, including “The Secret Technique of Marking Your Fingers” demonstration of all procedures

The Simple Chemistry Factors That Make A Good Solder Joint

  1. Solder Bond Formation I – How your solder bond is formed at first contact with your wave, in your wave and exiting your wave
  2. Solder Bond Formation Il – How your molten solder penetrates the base metal
  3. Flux – Roles of flux, acidity and pH level, types of fluxes, in-depth analysis of your activation points and breakdown temperature, verifying thorough and even flux distribution, measuring and controlling your weight of flux applied
  4. Wetting Force – Angle of wetting, solder fill
  5. Solder Temp – Relationship of tin to lead as your solder temperature changes

DAY 2 – At your wave machine and in classroom

How to REALLY Achieve World Class Wave Solder Results

  1. Measuring the 12 Key Data Points of Wave Soldering and Identifying the Exact Variables of the Wave Solder Process
  2. Recent Studies on Wave Solder Process Control – Review of published experiments, proven methodologies and results attained in production

Your PCBs Experience In The Wave Machine

  1. How to Integrate Your Variables – What happens when your boards pass through the wave machine at each phase of its functioning
  2. Why Temperature Control is So Easy – Preheat temp, preheat slope, maximum temp, delta T, top-side and bottom-side, solder wave temperature, the broad and forgiving temperature windows, daily temperature verification

Lead Free:  Basic Principles and Critical Issues

  1. Alloys
  2. Temperature Ranges
  3. Machine Issues
  4. Process Update
  5. Lead Free Defects – How to cure them; how to prevent them.

Hands-On Experiments For Superior Board Quality

  1. The Flow of the Solder Wave l – Solder wave flows, pulsations and variations
  2. The Flow of the Solder Wave ll – How your solder is pumped through the nozzle with its three characteristics:  malleability, elasticity and hardness
  3. The Flow of the Solder Wave llI – The qualities of flow, viscosity and velocity
  4. Parallelism – Full Implementation of “The Secret Technique of Marking Your Fingers”; roles of conveyor, solder pot, nozzle, dross deceptions, backplate
  5. Immersion Depth – Relationship to contact length, relationship to dwell time, how to determine and achieve repeatability
  6. Dwell Time – Definition, relationship to contact length, relationship to immersion depth, relationship to wave shape, optimization by board type
  7. Optimizing Your Wave Solder Process to Measure and Control Repeatability and to Identify and Maintain Optimal Parameters For Each Board Type – Provocation of defects, performance of fast responses to wave solder process measurements

DAY 3 – At your wave machine and in classroom

Wave Solder Process Knowledge Assessment and Learning Test

  1. Comprehensive, Interactive Review of Key Workshop Highlights, including the key data points and supporting parameters for process optimization
  2. Detailed Analysis of High Impact Daily Procedures
  3. Helpful Breakdown of Unique Methods to Eliminate Board Defects
  4. Thorough Review of Special Techniques to Quickly Lower Production Costs
  5. Further Illustrations  – using your own boards running through your wave machines

DAYS 4 and 5 – With individual staff members at your wave machines and in conference

Single-Minded Focus on Solving Your Specific Board Defects and Wave Machine Issues

  1. Active, expert, on-site troubleshooting to solve your specific wave solder challenges that were not remedied during group instruction.
  2. Working directly with a manager and engineer designated by you, on a one-on-one basis, to punch through your current barriers, cure your defects, and show you how to keep it that way.
  3. All factors will be considered:  Process, equipment, chemistry, materials and design.
  4. We will communicate with you in advance, to set priorities for this very special day of your workshop.  This includes identifying which board types and wave machines are at issue and characterizing the nature of your current concerns.
  5. Once your issues have been addressed, you will be provided with clear procedures to prevent their recurrence.

 Schedule now to reserve the earliest date that is best for you.

 

“Your company walked in here and quickly showed my staff how to reduce defects that we’ve had to live with for a long time.”

– Dennis Herrick, Director of Operations, Condor

“Many of our voids and insufficients were assumed to be design defects.  Your training instructor used our Optimizer’s measurements to make adjustments easily and now we should never see these defects in our production again.  What a relief!”

– Enda Moran, manufacturing Manager, CEL

“We thought we had tried everything possible to eliminate a bridging problem.  Using the Optimizer, in only a couple of minutes we got rid of the bridging completely by adjusting the dwell time.”

– Alfred Santilla, Wave Solder Supervisor, Universal Lighting

“Using the Optimizer’s techniques every day on one board type, we saved 257 hours of touch up and rework per month.  This saved our facility over $50,000 in 12 months on this one board type alone.”

– John Lanferman, Process Characterization Group Leader, Celestica

“The Optimizer made us re-think how we should wave solder.  We shouldn’t blame the board design as often and we cannot rely on a thermal profiler to control our wave process.”

– Martin Orozco, Process Engineer, TRW Automotive

“In all my years in PCB assembly, I have never seen such an enthusiastic response to a training program.  Other vendors never really improved our problems like you have.”

– Luis Velazquez, Engineering Manager, Plexus

“The proactive nature of your methodology, which allows us to identify board defects and production issues before they happen, is critical for raising yields.”

– Luis Lopez, Operations Manager, Benchmark Electronics

“Our main problem was recurring insufficients.  We made many attempts to address the problem, to no avail.  By using the Optimizer to graph our immersion depth, we identified and corrected turbulence in our main wave.  This has benefited our production process.”

– Jose Martinez, Maintenance Engineering Supervisor, Rain Bird

“Prior to investing in the Optimizer, we relied on a thermal profiler but we could not solve our skipping and insufficients problems.  In fact, those defects were not due to improper temperatures at all but instead to how our boards run through our solder waves.”

– Ricardo Soto, Process Engineering Manager, Tyco

“The Optimizer identified the root cause of chronic skipping on our boards.  We eliminated the disparallelism it measured.  This had an immediate, positive effect on board quality.”

– Aldrina Paredes, Training manager, Bose Electronics

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