[sdiy] Busting some lead free PCB myths

[Vesa Lahteenmaki]

Some of you have been so deeply worried about the shelf life of pcbs.  This 
degration of soldering properties has much more meaning in the pro world eg. 
mass production of smd stuffed boards.  If you would open your cell phone, 
you would find extremly small resistor and capacitor smds. The soldering 
surface of these is very tiny, thus requiring  a very good pcb surface for 
proper wetting. These componets also have a limited shelf life.

I don't think any of us use smd ovens for soldering tiny ( 0203, 0402 ) smd 
components at home, right ? More likely most of your componets are of old 
fashioned thru hole type and you will be soldering manually one component 
pin at a time, so degration of pcb surface has less meaning. Just clean the 
surface if necessary, that's it.  For mass production old pcbs might be 
useless, but not for you.

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