Speed hand soldering - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: austfox
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 20, 2020, 12:28:25 pm
content: Have a look at this video around the 22:00 mark. Watch the speed with which they are able to hand solder through-hole parts. Very impressive!https://youtu.be/HF0E8WeEUVM

author: SerieZ
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 20, 2020, 01:15:41 pm
content: Impressive indeed but I have quality concerns with this method.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 20, 2020, 01:55:10 pm
content: Uhh... it ain't gonna get 5 years if it can't pass production test in the first place. But even that is wishful thinking. More likely they're making the shovelware hawked on eBay and the like, if it works it works, if it doesn't too bad. Inspection to IPC-600? Laughable. Not exactly something to take pride in. Those poor kids don't seem to have any PPE or fume extraction, either.Tim

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 20, 2020, 02:06:43 pm
content: Vias most likely did not wet properly. Also very likely solder contains aggressive flux, otherwise it's hard to obtain wetting this fast with lead-free solder.

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 20, 2020, 03:31:50 pm
content: I thought it was cute when he said that through-hole has to be done by hand, not machine.The industry started with the Dynasert machine in the late 1950s that assembled pre-loaded tapes of through-hole parts and inserted them into boards.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1136048Note the publication date.https://www.shorpy.com/node/13217

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 21, 2020, 02:01:31 am
content: Quote from: blueskull on May 20, 2020, 02:22:43 pmHASL IME wets slower than good ENIG. Those holes most likely did not have enough time to heat up and wick molten solder inside them.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 26, 2020, 12:58:41 pm
content: Quote from: xfsolder on May 26, 2020, 12:43:22 pmIt's not really a drag soldering. More like conventional soldering with moving tip.

author: ebastler
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 26, 2020, 03:53:15 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on May 20, 2020, 02:06:43 pmWho says it's lead-free solder?It might indeed not be, since that video is several years old. And since maybe they simply don't care. Just look at the health & safety precautions -- there's even a small fan drawing fumes away from the guy who does the fast soldering, and blowing them right across the table to his colleague.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 26, 2020, 04:13:43 pm
content: Quote from: ebastler on May 26, 2020, 03:53:15 pmIt's dull. If tin-lead solder looks like this, it's even more crappy. Several years? ROHS was implemented in the end of 2004. It was said that video predates channel by a year, so it should be from 2016.

author: tkamiya
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 26, 2020, 08:22:09 pm
content: That's pretty scary. No attention to detail. If he missed a pin, no one will know until QA time.

author: KL27x
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 26, 2020, 08:37:29 pm
content: So much negativity.When your job is to solder endless stacks of the same thing, you find what gets you through it the fastest. This obviously works exactly fine. Because if it doesn't, then guess who gets to spend all night redoing them or else they're fired? The key is to keep it accountable, so you know who did what part of each batch of boards.The challenge is how long can a human being do this before they crack? When they crack, some of them will continue to do exactly like before, except without giving a duck. That's why it has to be accountable, to find this dude before he does $40,000 of damage.Most people don't want to get/keep this kind of job this badly. Even in China, they must rotate through workers like a gatling gun. Many companies have had to move high labor low wage jobs from one low wage country to the next as these workers make a little scratch, get enough clothing and food for their children, and then no longer want these jobs. But yeah, UK is bringing electronics manufacturing back home; that will be easy, right?

author: SilverSolder
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 27, 2020, 05:52:36 pm
content: Quote from: KL27x on May 26, 2020, 08:37:29 pmIf you are a clueless, everything is easy... sadly.

author: KL27x
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 27, 2020, 08:04:35 pm
content: Blueskull knows it, himself. But sure, you should expect/demand NASA-standard soldering when you have your "Arduino Blinky Shield" manufactured in China for 40 cents per.Whenever you solder stacks of the same board for hours at a time, you will discover what is actually possible. Notice the temp he sets the iron, it will not last long sitting around dilly dallying. You have to set all your dominoes up and keep the thing moving.I had a spell of soldering thru holes pin headers onto some hundred or so boards I had designed. One of the PCB's was a small board with 90% pin header for parts. The soldering didn't look like this at the beginning. But by the end it was pretty similar. I had solder reel hanging above. I also used extra rosin flux on the PCB. And a large (3-4mm, can't remember what was best) bevel tip running hot. And I ran top to bottom on the row, but between rows I moved right to left, so that the solder didn't shrink as fast, effectively (your left hand doesn' t have to move as much; in labor like this, it is often helpful to pay attention to economy of movement). I also used extra liquid rosin flux on the PCB. Which you will notice many of these features are present in the method the super-fast guy in the video uses. I was using lead solder, FWIW. 0.05", IIRC correctly. I don't remember my soldering being quite as fast, but it was in the same zipcode. I'm also not sure what he's soldering, here. I was doing full 0.1" pin headers on 0.06" FR-4.When the stack of boards you have committed to assembling yourself makes you want to die, the only thing that gets you through it is to focus on the process. Testing 5 different tips at different temps and using different work setups. Brush the flux or use syringe? You focus on a bunch of little things. (Syringe in this case, applied after the header is inserted/ leave a nice thick bead right where it needs to be). If there's a naggling suspicion that there's a faster or easier way to do it, then it will drive you crazy until you try it. You just need a big enough stack of boards where it feels like it's not moving when you're doing it like a NASA textbook. Then you'll learn something about it. If it's aerospace or military weapons or life support or I dunno, government contract work. Then maybe it's different. Most of the stuff we buy includes stuff soldered something like this.As blueskull says, if this didn't work exactly well enough for w/e they are doing, they wouldn't be doing it like this. You assume these guys stay in business making things that don't work? Or this is just for show, then they go back after the camera is off to fix it? Or are these just dummy boards to make them look efficient? Yeah, insult me. I'm clueless.You guys who think this is exceptional in some way? This is how it's done. You can't compete in Shenzen/Wuhan if you're not doing it like this. This is the norm. This isn't high cost prototyping, it's mass production. This is why we have it done in China. You can laugh at the poor quality and the laziness... but these workers aren't getting paid per unit. They're keeping this pace to make a couple bucks an hour. They're not rushing thru the work so they can take an early lunch or sit on the toilet for half an hour playing Angry Birds. The only thing at the end of this stack is the next stack. These are hard working people.

author: SilverSolder
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 28, 2020, 12:15:44 am
content: How far can you go in designing the board so no hand soldering is necessary, at all? There are SMD connectors and headers, right?

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 28, 2020, 12:31:16 am
content: Quote from: SilverSolder on May 28, 2020, 12:15:44 amThere are but they usually suck due to poor mechanical strength.

author: Shock
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 28, 2020, 01:22:41 am
content: Just cheap shitty work, with free emphysema as take home bonus.

author: vk6zgo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 28, 2020, 01:42:08 am
content: I have seen very few boards, either consumer or Broadcast grade, where there is evidence of hand soldering at all.Consumer stuff may be pretty much "throw away", but Broadcast, Comms & other commercial equipment often has life times measured in decades, so the (usually) automated soldering must pass quite strict testing.OK, the 30-40 year lifetimes of former days, are not so important with rapid changes in technology, but 10 years is still a realistic requirement.People doing small scale manufacture often "shoot themselves in the foot" by designing PCBs which look nice, but on some joints provide too little copper, making a proper joint hard to make, whilst on others, providing too much copper, which makes it difficult to apply enough heat to the joint, due to the heatsinking effect.This is often compounded by supplying a soldering station of inadequate capacity.Another delight is making the holes too small, so leads have to be "forced" into them, meaning that there is virtually an airtight seal, restricting solder flow through the "plated through" hole to the other side of the board.In the worst case, this means soldering both ends, doubling the time taken for such joints.In one job, the PCBs had all of these problems.I found that the only way to do a good job was to heat them in advance with a heat gun, solder the very "heat sunk" joints, then do the others.I hated that job---ln my opinion, small scale assembly is "the bottom of the food chain" in Electronics!

author: vk6zgo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 28, 2020, 02:03:31 am
content: Quote from: SilverSolder on May 28, 2020, 12:15:44 amThrough hole consumer stuff by major manufacturers has used automated flow soldering since the 1960s.The only reason this factory is using hand soldering is that it is a small scale operation, where low paid people are cheaper than the large automated equipment used in big factories.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 28, 2020, 02:16:11 am
content: Quote from: vk6zgo on May 28, 2020, 02:03:31 amAlso those boards had low TH pin count. Most likely it's faster and cheaper to hand solder them rather than run through wave soldering machine.

author: vk6zgo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 28, 2020, 02:57:57 am
content: Quote from: wraper on May 28, 2020, 02:16:11 amNot for Sony, samsung, et al.

author: daqq
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 28, 2020, 08:47:24 am
content: QuoteSMD connectors are generally inferior in terms of mechanical performance to THT stuff.There are techniques to reflow THT components without too specialized equipment, see pin in hole reflow.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 28, 2020, 09:57:12 am
content: Quote from: daqq on May 28, 2020, 08:47:24 amI use this method for SMD micro USB connectors which also have TH mounting terminals. The issue paste-in-hole is that connectors must survive reflow temperature and most TH connectors don't. The other issue is that you won't be able to place most of them with PnP machine.

author: SerieZ
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 28, 2020, 10:19:31 am
content: They use selective soldering machines where wave soldering is not applicable.If that is out of the window as well they use manual labor with IPC certified personal which is expensive that is why the Designer should be careful with his design... or send it to this manufacturer.Edit: I think certified is the more adequate word

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 28, 2020, 06:33:21 pm
content: Quote from: vk6zgo on May 28, 2020, 01:42:08 amOf course, if it’s expertly hand-soldered and cleaned, how would you even tell?

author: KL27x
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 28, 2020, 08:45:45 pm
content: Quote from: blueskull on May 28, 2020, 08:53:43 amEven doing 10 at a time, you would never solder like this. The dude in the video has probably done this exact procedure on this exact board dozens or hundreds of times within the last 24 hours. And even after doing it hundreds or thousands of times, the first few he does when he first sits down or changes to a new board, they won't look like that. It takes a few to get into the rhythm. You don't get to this speed by the end of 10 unless you're some kinda rainman. When you watch the video, you're still trying to figure out what you're looking at, and he is done already. Because he knows where to put his eyeball, and what to ignore, by now. He knows exactly the minimum thought and attention he can give the board in order to do just this one tiny part/procedure, and it's on a loop. He's aware of several things that are likely to go wrong (and he knows how to tweak speed/feed/temp to make those less likely), and he's looking for these problems as he goes, believe it or not. And he's adjusting his motions and feeds on this foodback loop. And he knows when the iron needs to be cleaned or tuned up or replaced. The only way this is possible is because he's doing at most a few steps on this board, repeatedly. The consequence of messing up is really bad... and to be avoided.* But in this case it doesn't mean missing limbs. So he can cut it really, really close, once he has learned all the various mistakes that can occur and how to avoid them. So long as efficiency is higher, not lower. If you try to do it like this without the experience, you will waste time. If you have never had an endless stack of one identical board to solder, then you wouldn't do it like this. You never had to cut this much ballast from the process; it would have been counterproductive to even go there.*Anytime you notice a bad joint, that you have to stop and fix, this is not a normal part of the process. You messed up. You crashed the car. You have to fix it, now, and that wastes so much time and rhythm, you can't imagine. Step 1 is to do figure out if you can do it in a way that works on the first try, every time. Moving forward and only forward is one of the main reasons machines get things done so fast. We like to waffle. After you get it working on the first go, now you get to make it faster. This is how fast he can drive the car through this route WITHOUT making mistakes. There's nothing sloppy about it; it's a race. Everything has been calculated.Sony surely does a lot of other stuff. Wave reflow. Jet reflow. Soldering robots. They either own lot of this fancy stuff or subcontract out to people who use this stuff. Even there, it depends on the job and the quantities. When you have this facility/line to do wave resoldering, that's significant expense and you hope to keep it busy, but you can't predict the future. Sometimes you have overflow that has to be handled by hand. Or sometimes you are using facility even though it barely saves cost on that job, simply because you have no other better jobs to do on it, at the time. You have a capability. But it's also something you have to feed. It costs in rental space, lease, workers/training, scheduling. It's not something you whip out when you need it then put it back on a shelf.Every job is different. And you start it out with a good idea. But you have to start it slow to find out what problems will arise, because problems arise. If you just set up the assembly line and press the button, then you will very quickly make a lot more work for yourself. The first 10 or so of a new board, this guy would be very smuch lower and learning what to look at and what to ignore, and learning what problems are likely to occur and where. How much room is there to work with, what if any pads to avoid touching. Which pins/pads, if any, have a strong connection to a pour/plane. The internal algorithm develops and gets refined over time. In a more sophisticated operation, he might get trained by someone else who figured all that out, already. What order, what speeds/temps, how much flux. It's not automatically automatic.