Once parallelism has been established, there are two more simple improvements that will bring you fast, large, measurable cost savings: Controlling immersion depth and optimizing dwell time - independent data points governing your boards' interaction with your solder wave.

Immersion depth must be in your control to achieve repeatable board quality. Direct and accurate measurement of immersion depth is therefore vital.

Likewise, dwell time is a critical factor in your board defects. Using optimal dwell times for your various boards is your goal after you've established parallelism and controlled your immersion depth. The dwell time of your leads in your wave is directly determined by four factors: Your immersion depth, your conveyor speed, your conveyor angle, and the exact shape of your wave.

Another success story: After establishing parallelism, a process engineer for plant in Mexico determined optimal dwell times for two board types. Yield loss dropped from 3.00% (330 boards) to 1.60% (176 boards) in the first month of daily adherence to the optimal dwell times. This means a reduction in scrapping of 154 boards per month, or 5.13 boards per day.

Since each of these boards costs the plant $300.00, savings just from improved yield loss total $46,170.00 a month - that's $554,040.00 a year! The OPTIMIZER paid for itself in less than five days.

"Our problems were recurring insufficients and bridging. We made many attempts to address these problems to no avail. By using the Optimizer software to graph our immersion depth, we identified and corrected turbulence in our main wave. This has been to the long term benefit of our production process."

Clemar Manufacturing

MYTH:

Rework and touch-up are part of production.

FACT:

Rework and touch-up are necessary only because of production failures on your assembly lines. Defects are production failures. Rework and touch-up cost huge sums of money in labor, floor space, rework stations, inspection, hand soldering equipment, consumables, management time and throughput, and increase the risk of field failures. You don't have to live with your current defect rate. Don't accept it.

MYTH:

The key to good wave soldering is thermal profiling.

FACT:

Thermal profilers give no accurate information on how your boards pass through your solder waves or on your fluxer performance. Without this information your process is fatally uncontrolled.

MYTH:

A glass plate provides all the information we need.

FACT:

A glass plate gives no precise, repeatable, quantified or retrievable data. Neither does it measure immersion depth. Assessments are subjective, depending on human judgment, eyeballing and reflex.

MYTH:

"The old wave machine is the problem" or "The new wave machine controls process."

FACT:

Some look to expensive machine upgrades to solve process deficiencies. The fact is that defects do not equal bad equipment and good equipment does not equal good process. You must control and optimize your process because no machine can.