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Thought that cheap solder was fine until my boss' project failed QA

I used to buy those $5 rolls of solder off Amazon cause hey, it melts right? Well last month we had a batch of 30 custom boards come back from a client with cold joints everywhere. Turned out my cheap solder had way too much flux residue and inconsistent melting point. My boss made me redo every single joint with the good stuff from Digikey and now I get why people spend the extra $8.
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singh.blair
and like the kicker is I literally had a spool of the good stuff sitting in my drawer the whole time lol. I just thought "eh it's just for a quick prototype, the cheap stuff will do." Now I got this mental rule where if I even think about saving a buck on solder I just remember sitting there at 2am reheating joints that looked like they were crying flux. honestly it's kinda funny looking back but that week I was ready to throw my iron out the window. learned my lesson for good though, never again.
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nancy_miller
nancy_miller22d agoMost Upvoted
Oh man, that's brutal. lol nothing like learning the hard way that saving $5 costs you 20 hours of rework.
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