Flux is friend. Not foe.
To create a solder joint, you have a lot working against you. Boards, parts, the air...it’s all very cold compared to the melting point of solder. Those are easily overcome with a good heat source in the way of a soldering iron, wave solder, or selective solder. However, none of this will do you a lick of good without flux because metal oxide is the biggest challenge you have to combat.
In this episode, we go over flux's role in fighting the oxide layer that forms during PCB assembly, the basic chemistry of flux, what cold solder joints are, and more.
pickplacepodcast.com
Flux is friend. Not foe.
To create a solder joint, you have a lot working against you. Boards, parts, the air...it’s all very cold compared to the melting point of solder. Those are easily overcome with a good heat source in the way of a soldering iron, wave solder, or selective solder. However, none of this will do you a lick of good without flux because metal oxide is the biggest challenge you have to combat.
In this episode, we go over flux's role in fighting the oxide layer that forms during PCB assembly, the basic chemistry of flux, what cold solder joints are, and more.
pickplacepodcast.com
Welcome to the pick place podcast, a show where we talk about electronics, manufacturing and everything related to getting a circuit board into the world. This is Chris Denney from Worthington.
Melissa:And this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub.
Chris:Welcome back, Melissa.
Melissa:We'll come back, Chris. It's been so long since we last
Chris:long, so long. I think my watch says it's been about 90 seconds or so.
Melissa:Wow. Okay. Do you have anything to catch up on and it's last 90 seconds.
Chris:I hope everybody enjoyed the debugging episode and all of the hate mail I got on that episode. Sorry, I haven't replied to it yet. So as mentioned in the previous episode, we're recording a few ahead here and yeah, so onto the next one,
Melissa:onto the next one, which is
Chris:about flux Now we're talking about actual flux, some good old fashion engineering, chemical nerdy flux. And I like to say flux is friend, not foe, although it can also be foe. Fox can be very corrosive and dangerous to your circuit boards. If you're aware of that. We, we can not really do anything to a circuit board without flux. Flux is sort of the it is the superhero that makes everything possible. this stuff like this whole, like getting down to the science of things. I think it is so cool. I absolutely love it. I don't want to get too science-y and too nerdy on this, although I
Melissa:No, you do want to, you just,
Chris:I do
Melissa:restrain yourself.
Chris:I'm attempting to to restrain myself. I do want to. But yeah, so, what does Worthington do? What does CircuitHub do? What do and does any cm do, we make solder joints. That's all. Right. At the end of the day, we're just taking these things and we're attaching them together. That's what we do. And how do we do it? Flux flux is how we do it. So let's, let's talk about creating a solder joint, right? You want to create you want to create a nice solder joint. You want to create a nice union between. The copper of the board and the, and the component and the solder. Right? So you've got it for, for listeners who may not be aware. And if you've listened to every episode at this point, you probably are aware, but I'm just going to restate the obvious. Everything in electronics has copper. Your circuit board is copper. You know, all those little traces on the board, they're all copper, your leads on your components. They're all copper, but they are coated because copper likes to oxidize Seen the statue of Liberty maybe. Yeah. Thought so. It likes to oxidize. So you got to cover that copper with something to prevent oxidation. Usually that covering is tin for pretty much almost every single component. It's tin sometimes it will be gold, but it's almost always 10. And a lot of times circuit boards are covered in either tin or very often gold, pretty much everything that Worthington and CircuitHub builds is covered in gold. And before you get excited and think that you can go make a million dollars selling our circuit boards, this gold is insanely thin. You were talking like. Like tenths of microns, then it's crazy, crazy, like nanometers then very, very little gold. But enough that when we recycle them, they pay us extra for the gold that's in there, which is kind of cool. Anyway, so you need to you need to create a nice wet solder joint between that copper of one component in the copper of your circuit board. Well, a solder alone. Doesn't want to do that in a normal environment because you have this awesome thing called a metal oxide layer, or what's the, what's the more common way of putting that now that I've said metal oxide layer. I can't think of a more common way of putting that oxidation, I guess. Yeah. Oxidation. Seen the statue of liberty much. All right. So, so metal oxide is actually an incredibly simple concept. When you break it down if you, Melissa went out into your garage and you took your keys and you scrape the paint on your car right down to the metal, what would you find?
Melissa:It'd be all shiny and silvery.
Chris:Shiny and silvery and pretty right. But as soon as you scrape that, I mean, the moment you scrape that you haven't even lifted your key off of your car, that steel has oxidized split second, like more or less instantly. And that oxide later layer that metal oxide layer Can get worse and worse and worse on steel because the ox they'll see, like oxide layers are different for like all the different kinds of metal. That's why like copper kind of has this like kind of greenish look over time. And that's why steel, like typical regular steel I'll call it like that. Your fender might be made of will rust. It's the same thing. It's the exact same concept. It's just that they have, they have different ways of oxidizing sort of like, you know, it's, the oxide layer is not like a film that covers everything perfectly, you know, it's, it's actually kind of like porous for lack of a better term. I'm, I'm grossly oversimplifying this I'm sure, but like the pores on a regular steel are really, really big, but then the pores on stainless steel are really, really tiny. And so that's why stainless steel does oxidize immediately. So it is aluminum. All of these things. We think of as not oxidizing they, they oxidize just as much as everything else, except they stop right there. That oxide layer ends up becoming a barrier to creating any more chemical reactions. It just did that once on the surface. And that was that because it was so tiny and tight that porous layer versus on steel, it's actually very porous and so more and more oxygen can make its way through that layer. And then the next layer and then the next layer and the next layer. And that is called. Can you guess Melissa
Melissa:No.
Chris:rust?
Melissa:Oh, okay. Okay. I thought it's out here. You're going for something more complicated.
Chris:Nope. Pretty simple. Yeah, I totally threw a curve ball there, but it's rust. Right? So like the fact that it can continue to oxidize over and over and over and over is rust. So gold basically. Like, I don't even, I assume that gold gets an oxide layer, but maybe it doesn't like gold. The reason gold is gold and the reason everybody loves it and wears it as jewelry and everything is because it doesn't rust. It doesn't oxidize. It it's like pretty forever. Like you can get dirt on it, you can get oils on it. And so it can kind of like, not look super great, but you can clean it and make it look perfectly fine. Again, you can't really do that with copper, right? Like you can't really clean. You can, you can sand it and make it shiny again, like you can take like, we had we had a grounding issue on our, on our house wiring from the, from the power company and the electrician had to sand the copper cable to expose it before he reconnected it. But you can't like clean it. You can clean gold because all you're doing is really like removing the dirt and oils and stuff. That's on it. Same with like with platinum, right. Platinum remained super, super shiny for that reason.
Melissa:Use like bar keepers friend on it,
Chris:There you go,
Melissa:but I guess that's. Oh, is it, is it, is it chemical or is it actually the friction of.
Chris:oh, it might be, might be. I don't know.
Melissa:Or catch up people use catch up. I think because of the acid in it would, that would
Chris:It's the acid. Ooh, you're getting ahead of ourselves, Melissa. That's your leading right into it. So before any further ado, that's that's really what we're talking about here with flux it's acid and that's why catch-up works. Flux is basically just a tool to remove that oxide layer. So like, tin will, will oxidize it. And copper will oxidize a little bit but it's not like a ton. And so you can, you can break through that oxide layer with flux, with the acid that's in flux. So flux is really like, it's not, it's not super confusing if you. Break it down into the basic three elements. You have the acid, which is, what's really doing the work. You have the resin or rosin, depending on the type of flux you're using that is carrying the acid. And then you have the solvent that allows you to dissolve the resin or the rosin. So like, if you think of it this way, like the, the, the acid is like, The human and the rosin is the car. And the solvent is the the roadway, the system of roads that gets you around. There's, there's your analogy for ya? Resin is typically, again, this is not absolutely true, and you know, you can, plenty of people can poke holes in this and please do send us an email if I'm wrong about this, that. Well, let's chat. Resin is typically soluble in water versus rosin is typically soluble in a chemical of some sort. Typically ispropyl alcohol is very common. Flux manufacturers will blend these chemicals together along with other chemicals for different sorts of properties. Cause they may have There was a million things that they might do with the flux. But at the end of the day, what we really, really want is the acid that's really what we're after, because the acid is what is going to work on that oxide layer. So, when you're trying to solder a circuit board, Depending on the coding that's used. And like I said earlier, it's typically either tin or it is gold. You need to have the appropriate amount of acid to break through that oxide layer. Now, thankfully, the oxide layer is, is usually pretty weak. Like I said earlier, gold it's more or less non-existent. Or maybe it is. I don't know. I don't, you know, I love the science of this stuff, but I'm not super strong on all of it. But the tin definitely has an, a bit of an oxide layer. And if you have completely exposed copper, you have quite a bit of oxide that you have to, you have to break through. So the nice thing is most of the fluxes that we get to use are not super, super aggressive. Like we're not soldering stainless steel. You can, you can solder stainless steel. You just need a good enough flux to get the job done. The other metal that we often have to solder to is nickel. We'll have a lot of nickel plated things. These are almost always battery tabs . We hate for this reason, right? Cause we've optimized our process for tin and gold for blasting through the oxides of, of tin and gold. Not necessarily for nickel it'll work. It just takes a little bit more effort because nickel is really great for battery context because the coating on batteries is typically nickel. And so you have nickel touching nickel, and you have a nice, strong connection and you're passing voltage through. So for the end product nickel works really, really great. But for soldering at can be a bit of a pain. It's just like, like we were saying earlier about, you know, how porous these oxide layers are nickel is little less porous than tin and gold. It's just a little bit harder to get through. So you, you need to use perhaps a more aggressive flux or you need to use more heat, or you need to use more time. All these sorts of things you got, there's gotta be a balance there because you know, if you use a really aggressive acid, you might, you might be destroying the board. You might be risking the board. You know, you gotta find the, sort of the happy medium that sort of Goldilocks. Well, flux alone doesn't really create a solder joint. Right? You need to add heat. So heat is obvious, like everybody thinks of when they're creating this object. Well, of course he needed that he needed to melt the solder. Yes, that's absolutely true, but that heat is also there to activate the flux because the way that these fluxes are designed is they're not really active at room temperature on purpose. That way they're, they're not kind of destroying the equipment and whatever else. You know, they, they have to be activated by heat. And so the, the chemical companies, the, the flux designers, they're, they're going to design a specific amount of heat that is required to get this thing active. And that's that activation period. Is different for every kind of flux. So when you're hands off you, you typically will have a core of flux in your wire. So if you've ever bought wire solder, you've probably bought the most common is like 2% or 2.2%, depending on who you buy it from of, of flux content to solder. So there will actually be like a little tiny sliver of flux down the middle of your soldering. And it's typically the content is typically around 2%. It can be as low as 1% or as high as 3%. And there's probably some others, but it's typically one, two or 3%. Most common, I think is 2%. Well that flux is designed to be activated like immediately, right. It's specifically because it knows it's going to see a soldering iron, and it's going to go from room temperature to 700 degrees just immediately. And. So that flux is designed that way, but when your reflow soldering, you need more of a progressive flux, right? It wants to be heated slowly and well because the board wants to be heated slowly. So the chemical companies are going to design it to match how the board is going to get reflowed so it's going to have this sort of progressive warming period To its chemical makeup and then for like wave soldering, selective soldering similar it's, you know, it's not going to be quite as slow as perhaps a reflow soldering is. It's going to be kind of more of a spiky profile if you will. Like if you were to chart out what the thermal profile looks like for these operations, it's a little bit more spiky. It's not as spiky as hand soldering, right. That's cold to crazy hot immediately. But at somewhere in between, so each of these fluxes are going to be designed. For that particular operation. So when you talk to the chemical company, you let them know what you're using it for, and they can let you know which chemical you need to, you know, do your work. Because at the end of the day, like we were saying earlier, you need these fluxes to get through that oxide layer to create good now, how do I describe wedding?wetting a verbal medium like this oh boy. So everybody, hopefully everybody who's listening to this podcast has seen a solder joint before. It has this sort of nice concave appearance to it, right? the joint kind of flows inward you know, Gosh, how do you design it? It's concave. I don't know how else to design it. it's you know, it's got this nice wetted appearance. If you did not break through that oxide layer you're going to have, what's called a cold solder joint. And then your solder joint is going to look convex. It's going to kind of bubble out. It's not going to look right. It's going to have, you know, the wrong appearance. And th these are typically called a cold solder joints, but I've also, I've, I've heard people refer to them as dry solder joints. And honestly, I think dry is, is the more appropriate. Yeah, it makes way more sense because we're talking about wedding. We're not talking. Heat when it comes to the shape of a solder joint if it has that convex shape, it could just be excess solder that that's actually quite common. So don't be too alarmed if you see boards come from us that have a bit of a convex shape. But the if you do see that, and it's not excess solder, it could be a cold joint or a dry joint. And what that means is the flux was. Sufficiently activated. Now it got plenty of heat. It wasn't cold. That solder melted, right. It melted. It just didn't wet properly. You didn't get the nice intermetallic union between the solder and the copper. And what that looks like at like a chemical or atomic level. I have no idea. I just, I just know what it is. You know, through a microscope and with just staring at it with my eyes, it's, it's, you know, it's not wettted it's not sticking to that copper really the way that it should. And that's almost always because you know, the, well, it can, it can often be because maybe it was a really heavy copper plane. And so it did pull a lot of heat out of it. it means that that flux did not get properly activated and, and didn't get that nice wetting now. It's not the end of the world. If you have one of these joints, like if you see that in front of you it, it's probably still, it probably still has a pretty good connection. It may just not work forever. Right? It may fail in five years instead of 50 years or something like that. It's, you know, there's kind of a balancing act between these things, but when you're designing a manufacturing process, you know, and you're, you're profiling everything you want to make sure you profile it appropriately. So you get that nice wet, you know, solder joint and everything is just stuck together. Really, really good. The truth is. Metal really, really, really, really wants to stick to the metal. That's why that's why metal so strong. That's why it doesn't just pull apart like a fabric or, or paper towel or something. You know, it metal is metal because it wants to stick together and, and the same is true for. For tin and copper, these two metals want to stick together. It's that oxide layer that does not want them to stick together. So, okay. So going back to your garage, Melissa, and, and you were really, really angry at your car and so you were keying it, right. If you were to fill your garage with nitrogen and then do that. Metal that you exposed that shiny metal would stay shiny forever because there's no oxygen in the room and you would be dead
Melissa:yes. I wouldn't be able to go into that room or drive my car.
Chris:or your car wouldn't start either because there'd be no oxygen for the ignition. Fun fact, some cars would start.
Melissa:Oh, okay. Maybe, maybe your car would start Chris.
Chris:But yeah, but the, the the oxygen is really what's creating the oxide layer and that is what's preventing those metals from sticking together. So the other thing is when you're soldering, a lot of times your cm and. And we do too. We'll use nitrogen in that soldering process. So if you're hand soldering, almost certainly you're not using nitrogen, I've seen it, it does exist. It's weird, but it's usually for special applications for like soldering to stainless steel or some other weird metal. But usually if you're hand soldering a circuit board, you're not going to see a nitrogen. You're almost always, but I think pretty much absolutely. Going to see nitrogen in a selective soldering operation. It is essential to the selective soldering process. You must have nitrogen because that, as we mentioned earlier, that oxide layer forms immediately, there is absolutely no delay in the oxide layer forming So you need that nitrogen there with wave soldering it's it is fairly common to see nitrogen in that environment to, again, to prevent the oxide layer from building up. But, but because you have sufficiently covered this board in flux and you've heated it properly through the pre heaters in a wave soldering machine. And because you're turning over so much solder. So quickly that even though it does oxidize immediately it usually it's so negligible because you're turning over so much solder so quickly that you don't always have to have nitrogen. So it's, it's a bit of both. I've seen it a bit of both like a lot of shops, like to have nitrogen on it, but a lot of shops don't want to have the expense of all the nitrogen. So I've seen a bit of both with recently. Reflow is a bit of a mixed bag. We actually, Worthington does not use any nitrogen for our reflow because our flux is designed to work without nitrogen. but CircuitHub their oven, they, they do a bit of both, depending on the application. They may have to use a type of flux, solder paste that requires nitrogen. So there's a little bit of both and, and they can, and you can switch it on and off in these, in these reflow ovens, you can, you can fill them with nitrogen and reflow some, and then you can turn it off and it'll just be air, but. The consumption rate of a reflow oven with nitrogen is insane. I mean, it's absolutely insane. You're talking like probably somewhere in the range of two to $400 a day to operate one reflow oven with a nitrogen turned on one eight hours.
Melissa:Oh,
Chris:So like what, 50, 50 bucks an hour to, to operate a reflow oven with filling it with nitrogen. That's how much nitrogen you're using. Not even, not even talking electricity, just the nitrogen 50 bucks an hour. It's crazy. It's yeah, it uses enormous. So there, you know, there's, there's a financial reason why you would not want to do that, but sometimes it is a requirement and you just have to do that because you're, again, you're trying to create. You know, you try, are you trying to blast through the oxide layer to create that nice intermetallic union, those nice wet solder joints. And if you have oxygen in the way, you've, you're going to have a problem. You're not going to be able to get a nice, soft, dry, well, all right. Let's pivot a little bit. So we talked about the process of, of using flux, but let's, let's talk a little bit. I'm not gonna. Too much into the weeds of, of what flux is. We did a little bit, we talked about the acids and the rosins and the, and the solvents, but let's talk about. The big, the big 10,000 pound gorilla in the room. Flux residue, because everybody loves to ask us about the flux residue on their boards. Typically, we get asked about the flux residue on the boards from customers and engineers that have never seen it before. Perhaps they come out of the defense world and they've always seen perfectly clean circuit boards or, you know, I dunno some industry. All they've ever worked with was clean boards. And then all of a sudden we start shipping them boards cause they are at a new company and they don't have this requirement and they look at the boards and they say, well, what the heck is going on here? There's flux all over my board it's like, This is normal now for like, I would say wholly 99% or greater of, of boards made out there. And pretty much any application you can think of flux residue on your finished assemblies is totally fine. Not going to be a problem. In fact, this flux can, can actually work as a bit of a barrier because. It's got this, you know, it's got this sort of a coating which is covering all of your solder joints. And that means that dust and debris and metal shavings and bits and stuff can't can't cause a problem. Now, granted, this flux layer is very, very thin and very, very fragile. And so any, you know, it would not take much to get through this flux barrier, but it is. It is a barrier is, you know, it's not a conformal coating. Right. I know a lot of people like to say, oh, it's like conformal coating in your board. If you use no-clean flux, that's, that's not true at all. It's it is a bit of a barrier, but it's not like conformal coatings, a totally different beast. And, and much, much, much more powerful barrier. But those residues that are on the board. They are not corrosive. They have been as long as they've been properly activated, which most fluxes nowadays, like, especially the fluxes that are used that go through your reflow oven, that things seen a lot of heat, that those are completely activated. You have nothing to worry about with any of those fluxes liquid fluxes that you add in a machine. They've gotten these things down to being activated at like crazy low temperatures now. So we're hitting them with 300 and. 300 to 320 degrees Celsius. Nitrogen we're blowing nitrogen on, on this flux. It is completely inert at like 82, or excuse me, completely activated at like 80 degrees Celsius, like a really low temperature, very hot for a human don't burn yourself. But it's a relatively low temperature for soldering. Those fluxes are totally activated and the residues on there are totally. They did. They're not a risk to causing a corrosion on your board,
Melissa:What, what is the residue of made out of composed of.
Chris:it's. Yeah, it's mostly that rosin because the solvent is gone now and the acid has broken down and, and has become other things through chemical reactions and science. And I don't understand it all, but it's mostly the rosin or the resin that's remained on the board, actually come to think of it. Probably not resin because the resin would be possibly still chemically active and that has to be washed off. So we use exclusively, no clean flux at Worthington and CircuitHub we will not use inorganic acid, a water-soluble flux. These are, these are potentially more powerful fluxes and they can, they can solder nickel better. That's for sure. That's for darn sure. But there, there you know, you have to clean them. You have to clean them completely. They, they can remain corrosive on the board, even within like 24, 48 hours of being on the board. You don't want to leave these things even over. This flux on the board. So you got to have a wash system and wash gets very expensive, right? So now you're talking, you got to all these chemicals, you've got water, you got filtration, you got heat and steam. And you know, it's very, time-consuming, it's environmentally intensive, it's expensive. There's a lot of great benefits to no-clean. And the other thing is because no clean is so popular. All of the best chemistries are being developed for no clean. All the latest and greatest technologies in the flux world really are focused on no clean flux now. So, they're just amazing stuff. The chemicals we're using today compared to 20 years ago. I remember, I remember the first time I ever used a no-clean flux and it was like, oh, it works. It's got this awful residue. Like that's kind of like oily and sticky and gross and they've come a long way, baby. This stuff is awesome. Now it, it, it feels clean. It looks clean. It's, it's almost always like completely invisible for the most part. Yeah. To the modern no-clean fluxes are awesome. And that, that term, no clean means that if properly activated you do not need to clean them. If you have a super high reliability application, you should probably clean them. If you have a super high like impedance or resistance circuit, you should probably clean them because flux has, it does have like a zero resistance value or excuse me, non infinity resistance value. There is some. Current carrying capacity, but we're talking many millions of homes. And so for the most part, you'll never notice this in 99.9999999% of circuits. Unless I S like I said, if you have some circuit that has a 30 ohm resistor or 30 megaohm resistor, you might notice it. Maybe, maybe there, you might see it. But not absolutely. So I, you know, there's probably other applications, but. I'll be honest, I'm kind of a crappy engineer. So, you know, take this with a grain of salt. If you think you need your boards cleaned you know, let us know and we can talk about it. We are working on that. That's the perennial joke on this podcast. Working on getting cleaning capacity. We had, we're all lined up to get it. And then we just had all these other priorities get in our way. And so we still do not have the ability to clean circuit boards here at Worthington or CircuitHub. It's coming. We can do spot cleaning. We can do cleaning on very small volume orders. We do have facilities for handling that, but we don't have a nice automated cleaner yet. So it's it's just Bob out in the back with a brush and not just kidding. Anyway, the point of all, this is a flux have no fear because your friend, it is not your foe, unless you don't properly activate it, then it's your fault and it can be corrosive. So make sure you trust your cm and that they're properly activating your flux.
Melissa:excellent.
Chris:How'd you like your chemistry lesson today?
Melissa:It was good. I feel like there could have been slightly more chemistry though. You
Chris:Oh, okay. I'll give you one. I'll give you one rosin. Rosin is made from tree SAP.
Melissa:I did know that. Yeah.
Chris:Yeah. And that's why it smells so good when you heat it and burn it. It does actually smell very pleasant. Really does.
Melissa:we use it for the violin strings, right?
Chris:Hello? I think so. I think you're right. Super cool.
Melissa:Yeah. That would be cool to get like an actual someone who knows actual chemistry on the show to break
Chris:I, as a matter of fact, when I, when I visit I may have mentioned in, I think it was in the previous episode paying a visit to a solder manufacturer and chemical manufacturer, all in one shop in Canada and a few weeks, maybe I'll find a connection and we'll get them on the show. That'd be a lot of
Melissa:that'd be cool. Okay.
Chris:right. But can we talk about my favorite thing in the world?
Melissa:Yeah. Your favorite thing in the world. I, you know what,
Chris:my pet peeves.
Melissa:thinking about the last episode that we just recorded it now, I kind of want to put like a request, a pet peeve button, you know, like on our website that just like sends an email, sends an automatic automated.
Chris:like, I'm not, I'm having too good of a day. I need to hear a pet peeve to bring me down. That's what that button will be used for. I I'm a do it yourselfer, no shock, no surprises there. I know. Right? Shocking that Chris, Chris Denney is a do it yourself. I do have my limits. I do have my limits, right. Like I really, really hate drywall finishing. So I will hire out dry wall finishing
Melissa:Okay, so you won't repair the whole.
Chris:No, I'm sorry. I I'll I'll hang the drywall. I'll patch it, but somebody else is going to put that mud on. Not, not interested, but I do actually really enjoy doing like plumbing stuff. I don't know why I, whatever reason I enjoy this and like, around.
Melissa:Okay.
Chris:Yeah, well, no, I don't like the dirty plumbing. I like the clean plumbing.
Melissa:No toilets.
Chris:I've done. Plenty of them. I've done way too many for friends and family and ourselves and two houses and I I'm I'm. Yeah, no, thank you. I'll do it if I have to, but I don't like to, but no, like even around our shop, so we have a lot of compressed. And to move compressed air around the shop. You typically use copper but there's like aluminum systems. Now there's other systems now. But anyway, like I am so frustrated by the use of trade sizes to describe like pipe sizes versus actual dimensions. This drives me.
Melissa:Oh,
Chris:Crazy. And I, and I get that it's because I'm a novice. Right. I get that. Like any plumber, a professional would look at a, you know, a pipe and go, oh, that's a half inch pipe. I get that. But then I would put my calipers on it and it's like, well, actually it measures like 0.6 inches. So why do you call it half a day? Why do you call it a half an inch? But then there's like, then there's like, oh, well this type of pipe you call half-inch because we measure the inner diameter on this kind of pipe, but this kind of pipe, we measure the outer diameter. So that's the size it's like, oh gosh, why, why is this a thing? This is getting back to my, I love standardization. This is getting back to why I'm frustrated that we don't have. Metric system everywhere. I love standardization and I wish this whole trade size thing would just disappear. And we could just go to, like, everybody just agrees. You measure the inner diameter and that's the actual size and that's the size you need to order. It just drives me crazy. It drives me crazy because I get like, okay. Wall thickness, wall thickness is a thing, right? Cause you can buy copper pipe. You can buy half inch copper pipe that's thinner or thicker wall thickness. And I think it's because the inner diameter is a half inch and the outer diameter is variable. And so that's why they call it half inch pipe. But then it's like, well, what if I'm buying a coupling? Maybe, maybe I need to buy a half-inch coupling that's for the thicker wall thickness, you know? And then maybe that half-inch coupling, isn't going to work. I just,
Melissa:It's a, it's a, here's a conspiracy. It's, it's the professionals. They're doing it on purpose. So that the regular newbs, like you, aren't going to take their jobs.
Chris:I think it's big pipe, the the lobbyists for big pipe. They're they're making sure Washington will never change their trade sizes.
Melissa:That's what it is, but it's definitely what it is.
Chris:It's a big pipe that I'm in big pen thereafter us. There's a throw back, filling out forms. Oh gosh. I've this is not a pet peeve. This was just a terrible personal experience. I'd like to share. I have a crack in my windshield and my car.
Melissa:still still there?, Chris: Yes, it And I don't, I didn't want to replace it in the winter because now you have the, you know, the warm garage, the cold air. And I could just create another crack if I just got to replace, I wanted to wait until it was warm out to replace it. So I, I called my insurance company and that was just a total disaster because they said this was, this was a lovely. Can we not, can we not patronize people that I had to sit through like five straight minutes of the insurance agent explaining to me how deductibles work? It's like, look, I know. In my late thirties here, I've had insurance. I know how deductibles work. You don't have to explain to me how deductibles, but I was trying to argue that I am not supposed to be paying for the replacement windshield because we have a $0 windshield replacement plan in our insurance. And anyway, it just got complicated. It was very frustrating, but my windshield has to be replaced. And then my cameras have to be recalibrated after the replacement of the windshield. And the manufacturer does not work with the, like the safe lights of the world. You have to take it to the manufacturer to get the cameras recalibrated, or they can do it both in one shot. So we're going to do it both in one shot. But insurance is just the worst. It's just the worst. Oh gosh. Sorry. You can cut this whole thing out. That was just an awful experience. have to now have the jingle in my head.
Chris:Oh, I know. It's a good jingle.. It works. It's way better than the LIMU LIMU, you know, Liberty, Liberty that that's not a good jingle. That is not a good jingle. We're just going to shout Liberty four times in a row. It's like, no, that's not a jingle. Yeah. It's terrible. Terrible. Not as none of them, none of them compete with the cars. A song though, that
Melissa:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chris:for all time, for all the time. They recorded that thing in like the seventies and just have not changed it for 50 years. And it's so perfect. Don't ever change cards for kids? Yeah. Yeah. Big pen, big pipe thereafter. Big insurance really is.
Melissa:That one is not a conspiracy.
Chris:That's not a conspiracy at all. That's straight up truth. Well, if you are as frustrated by insurance, as we are, please feel free to email us. You can. Email us@contactatpicplacepodcast.com. You can tweet us at CircuitHub or at w assembly.
Melissa:Thanks for listening to the pick place podcast. If you like, what you heard consider following us and your favorite podcast app, and please leave us a review on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Chris:Thanks, Melissa. And thank you everybody for listening