I had a friend who owned a contrack manufacturing company.  He said that he
used a dishwasher and it worked better than anything else.

He also tod me that on his wave soldering machine the bubble fluxer never
did as good a job as just spraying the boards with a cheap spray bottle with
water soluble flux.

I lay all my boards on a rack that is like an oven rack and spray the bottom
with the bottle before I solder them.  I have a cheap heat gun that I run
them over to activate the flux.  After soldering I just clean them with hot
water from my sink.  My wife probably would kick my butt if I used her
diswasher, not to mention the nasty chemicals that might get on our dishes.

Brian Kraut
Engineering Alternatives, Inc.
www.engalt.com

-----Original Message-----
From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu [mailto:piclist-bounces@mit.edu]On Behalf
Of Marcel Duchamp
Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2007 4:54 PM
To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Subject: Re: [EE] Dishwasher flux cleaning/DI water?


Forrest Christian wrote:
> Reading all of the flux effects thread made me start to re-think about
> cleaning the flux residue off of the boards I make on the small assembly
> line I have here.  I currently use no-clean flux which is cleanable with
> water if so desired.  But I generally don't do any cleaning.
>
> I understand that a dishwasher can be a good tool for this (and is a
> fairly common fixture for short production runs).
>
> I'm wondering if anyone has used a dishwasher for this and can tell me
> the do's, don'ts and gotchas?
>
> Also, several sources indicate that you really want to use deionized
> water for the cleaning.  I can understand that the reason behind this is
> that you want to avoid putting worse things (from the water) on the
> board than you are taking off.   With that in mind, is there a good
> filter I can buy which will do a good enough job to be able to provide a
> source of water for the dishwasher?
>
> -forrest

I have not used a dishwasher like this but assembly houses I've used
certainly did.  They ranged from 2 ladies in a garage using a portable,
roll-around unit from Sears to one that ran XP and had a network
connection and made it's own DI water.

Anything in your water will remain behind when the water evaporates; you
must decide yourself based on your local water quality what will work here.

I experienced 2 gotchas:
One assembly house refused to read written instructions concerning first
washing the boards and only then soldering on a backup battery.  The
battery, as small as it was, corroded traces and so on.

The other problem came not from using a washer system but from not using
it; another assembly house forgot to wash a BGA part.  Later, it became
terribly flaky due to the flux residue.  Water soluble fluxes
*absolutely* must be removed.

Which brings up a question: what kind of no-clean flux do you have that
also will wash off with water?  The stuff we have here does not do so.
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