Intrusive soldering, also known as pin-in-paste, is a method that uses solder paste to solder the thru-hole leads instead of hand soldering, wave soldering, or selective soldering. If designed properly, it's a great way to save time and money during pcb assembly. In this episode, we discuss how intrusive soldering is done, challenges associated with this process, and design recommendations.
Episode links:
Wurth USB-C Guide
Our favorite USB-C port
pickplacepodcast.com
Intrusive soldering, also known as pin-in-paste, is a method that uses solder paste to solder the thru-hole leads instead of hand soldering, wave soldering, or selective soldering. If designed properly, it's a great way to save time and money during pcb assembly. In this episode, we discuss how intrusive soldering is done, challenges associated with this process, and design recommendations.
Episode links:
Wurth USB-C Guide
Our favorite USB-C port
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 with Worthington.
Melissa:and this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub
Chris:welcome back, Melissa.
Melissa:Welcome back, Chris.
Chris:Yeah, once again, just audience, if you're not aware, we're trying to record ahead because of our individual going awayness over the past or the next few weeks. At this point, may, perhaps even the past few weeks, depending on when you're listening to this,
Melissa:True. Yeah.
Chris:by now. So not much to catch up on, but just wanting to continue to produce some content and get it out into the world and get in to get it into your hearts and minds. Yeah.
Melissa:Teach the peoples about manufacturing
Chris:we need to make it happen. So this week I thought we would talk about kind of. Kind of a, not well-known honestly, subject intrusive soldering. This is a better known, oftentimes as pin in paste. Are you familiar with that, Melissa?
Melissa:yeah.
Chris:Okay. pin and paste. Intrusive soldering. Yeah. So there's obviously there's a ton of different ways to solder components to a circuit board. Everybody knows the good old fashioned hand soldering with an iron wave soldering, very popular. We Should have an episode on wave solder and actually yeah, definitely. Should. We've talked about selective soldering in the past. That's a fun episode. There's if you look back in the archives, there was an episode about that. Probably probably 20 episodes ago at this point. And reflow soldering and there was definitely an episode about reflow soldering and each of them have a different application, right? So the wave soldering and selective soldering are obviously for through components. Reflow soldering is obviously for surface Mount components, primarily. And hand soldering can be for both. It depends on what you're trying to do, right. But more commonly in a manufacturing environment, hand soldering is reserved just for through-hole components. But there are some actually interestingly enough, there are some surface Mount components that you have to solder by hand. Can you, can you guess what those might be? Melissa surface, Mount component that you would have to hand solder. This is a trivia.
Melissa:Should I.
Chris:No, maybe not. I'm just curious if you can guess,
Melissa:Surface Mount component that you have to solder by hand
Chris:so this is fun for the listeners too, cause they're going to be like, Hmm. I wonder what he's thinking of.
Melissa:email your response below before
Chris:Spoiler alert, skip ahead. 30 seconds. If you don't want to know what it is, and then you can email your.
Melissa:I feel like I'm on jeopardy. This is what it must feel like to be on jeopardy.
Chris:do, do You do what is batteries?
Melissa:You know, that's what I was going to say. And then I
Chris:You should have just said it.
Melissa:I know I always second guess myself. Cause that's my problem. I don't like being wrong. So I'd rather just not that's one of my fatal flaws, so yeah.
Chris:you go, well, it hasn't killed you yet. So you're, you're doing Okay. with a fatality ness of your fatal flaw there. Yeah, batteries do not like reflow ovens. They do not like a selective soldering machines wave soldering machines. They don't like them. So by and large, you have to, you have to hand solder batteries cause you don't want to get them too hot. It messes with their chemistry. Um, Yeah. And it literally, it will literally explode and catch on fire or some of them, but if they're small enough, we've, we've accidentally reflowed them before it happens. Weird things happen. Right. And yeah, usually they just kind of pop in and they come out all burnt up. And the boards, typically the board looks like I had a little mini firecracker go off parts, go everywhere. It's yeah, it's no fun. That's for
Melissa:sounds like a mess.
Chris:Yeah. do not do not put batteries in ovens. Trust me. It will not, it will not end well, you will burn your house down and I can't recommend it. So, okay. So what the heck is intrusive soldering? Well, it is not it is not a different type of machine. It is still using your reflow oven. But it is using your reflow oven to solder through hole components. Yeah. and it is kind of cool, especially for people designing products to think about intrusive soldering and opportunities for intrusive soldering. So like we had a whole episode in the past about. the component selection. Should you go SMT or should you go through hole and it all depends on what you're trying to do with it in my, my my Quip is always, you know, if the gorilla is going to touch it and make it through hole in other words, if a human is, yeah, if a human is going to interact with this thing they're going to break it. And if it's surface Mount it's not going to be super strong. So, so make it through hole. You can, you can use, we've actually had customers use right angles, surface Mount like several ports and stuff in the past, but oftentimes once they get into their enclosure, there's like some nuts and bolts that are part of the enclosure. And they're part of the serial port that holds it all together. And then they're more than strong enough. So like, The nuts and bolts are hanging on to the you know, they're supporting the strength of that connector, not the circuit board, not the solder joints anymore. So, so that, that could be a good way of saving money is by going with surface Mount connectors. If, if you have some kind of an enclosure that's securing this device but more often than not you know, it's the circuit board itself and the through hole leads that are making this nice and strong. And so by making it through whole that's, that's going to prevent your user from damaging it. Not all not all components are purely surface Mount or purely through hole. There are Just a ton of what I'll call hybrid components. So these are most often some kind of USPS. That's by far the most common type of hybrid component. We see it can be many USB used to be the hotness. We used to see many USB all the time. We are seeing less and less and less mini USB. Thank goodness.
Melissa:Just to the many U S.
Chris:Oh my God. I hate, oh, you know What? I apologize. Many USB is fine. It's micro micro U. Yes, death to micro USB down with micro USB off with micro USBs head. Whatever you want to call it. I, I, I hope to watch micro USB, you know, go down in flames and never to be seen in this world again, because it is the most frustrating, irritating component in the world to deal with. Mini USB is actually quite nice that those, but they're larger than micro USB and, and they they're just better designed for manufacturing. The issue with the this is a bit of a tangent, but it is related The issue with the micro USB and keen listeners of the show have probably heard me complain about this before you want to talk about pet peeve. Oh my gosh. Micro USB ports. Oh, I could go on forever, but they have these flanges at the end that help because that, that connector is so tiny. If you look at the end of a micro USB cable, it's a tiny, tiny little connector. And if you're trying to plug it into something you, you almost want like a funnel shape to help direct the connector, you know, or, you know, the plug into the connector. And that flange is that funnel shape, but the trouble is that flange will dip below the edge of the PCB and the surface level of the PCB. So you need to have a relief cutout for it. And more often than not, we don't notice this ahead of time, or we're not warned by the designer. Not that the designers should care. It's not really their problem to deal with. It's our problem to deal with. But. And the, or sometimes you know, they'll, they'll put it too far inside the board, right? So they'll put the, they'll put the pads too far inside the board. So then we can't help, but have the flange sit on the board if we want to. It's it's, it's a nightmare. I'm so glad micro USB is going away and, and being replaced by USBC. Not that USBC is easy, but it's easier. It's easier to deal with. The micro USB mini USB was fine. Mini USB didn't have that flange. It just sat right on the surface of the PCB. No problem. We'll, we'll do mini USB all day. USBA those are typically through hole. They can be surface Mount we've. We've seen some surface Mount, but they're almost always through hole or they are a hybrid and they have some surface Mount leads and some through hole leads, which is how you would define a hybrid component. USB I think. I think I've seen some hybrid USB B ports before, but they're typically through hole only. Those are the big chunky ports. Those are like your printer ports. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Those are, those are nice heavy duty. They're not always hybrid the most. The, by far the most , common hybrid components we see now are USB-C ports. And they're actually great. I don't mind USB-C ports at all. There's a whole variety of. And actually w we'll have some links in the show notes. I included in our outline here, But Wurth makes a fantastic series of USB-C ports. If you're looking for a good USBC port, you cannot go wrong with a worth port there. they're, absolutely fantastic. They are a bit on the pricey side but I, I.
Melissa:they're worth their money.
Chris:Yes, they're worth their money. Totally. They're totally worth their money. There. There's some alternatives from like FCI and some other some other brands out there that are, that are good, you know, perfectly find, Amphenol. Let's see, what else do we have here? Real time. Real time research. Who are these guys? Oh yeah. CUI, CUI they're, they're another nice manufacturer of these ports. Who's this guy, Stewart, Stewart connector. There's a whole variety of companies making these, these ports, but Wurth by far just they make the best ones. And they have fantastic documentation about how to properly do your layout for these things. And and they have like amazing documentation on how to process them. So, so for somebody like us, like that has. to assemble your circuit board with these USB-C ports. How do we, how do we do it? They, they put together a great documentation and actually videos and everything on how to, how to do it properly. You don't have to worry about that. If you're a designer, don't worry about that. We'll worry about that. But you know, you're welcome to read it, cause it might give you a good idea of, of what we have to deal with. But don't, don't, don't over complicate things. W if we see the USBC port, we know how to take care of it. But yeah, these are by far the most common. Hybrid components now. So this means we're putting this part on the board during the surface Mount process, but it has the. Through whole leads that we have to deal with. So how do we deal with them? We deal with them using intrusive soldering. In other words it's kind of intrusive soldering and it's kind of a catch all term for you know, using a reflow oven to solder through hole components. There are through whole leads. And another way of putting this is using a pin and paste. So in other words, you're putting those pins, those through hole pins, instead of those through whole leads, I'm going to differentiate them just for the sake of this conversation. Oftentimes those pins and leads are used interchangeably, but I'm going to call the pins the through hole leads. And leads, we'll call those the surface Mount leads. So pins are through hole leads are surface-mount. The pins are going to go through the board and the leads are going to, it's going to solder to the surface. So we have to use a stencil to put the solder paste down for the surface Mount leads. And when you can, you also want to try to use your stencil to put solder paste down for the through hole leads. What's nice about this is there's no added process to solder those through hole components. Cause if you think about it, if we were just the side of the surface, Mount leads then when we need to solder the through hole pins, we would have to either use a wave solder, a selective solder hand solder, you know, there would be a secondary process to completing this component, but could we do it all at once? And if we can, that's where we're using this technique of intrusive soldering. And it's not easy to be honest with you. Like, it's great when you can nail it. It's the best because you're getting this like full, complete, beautiful solder joint. There is no solder joint better than what a reflow oven can give you. When you're using a selective soldering machine, those are great solder joints. Don't get me wrong. Like they're really nice and pretty and strong and, you know, plenty of solder and everything, but that, that board is never getting to the same temperature in a selective soldering process, as it is, and a through a reflow process. Because in a reflow oven, you're, you're baking that entire board. That whole thing is getting above the liquidous point of solder. And so you're just getting these, just that intermetallic connection is just like so perfect and so beautiful. So really intrusive soldering does result in a superior, more reliable. Long-lasting solder joint than other processes, especially it's way better than hand soldering. And it is, it can be arguably, as I just did argue better than selective soldering. I could totally see somebody arguing the opposite that a selective soldering joint would be superior. And a wave soldering joint would be superior. There's a chance that you have less voiding with. those processes, very good chance to have less voiiding but there's, there's a lot of benefits to the intrusive soldering processes I just described, but it is not easy.
Melissa:yeah. How does this actually work, do you put paste over the holes then so that the pins can go through the holes. Is that why it's called intrusive?
Chris:Yes. You got it. Exactly, exactly. That that in a nutshell, that's exactly what we're doing, but the tricky thing is the solder paste. Like, so if you, if you pick up a jar of solder paste and say that jar is 500 grams, a very typical solder paste jar is about 500 grams. About, let's see, let's do some quick math, about 450 grams of that jar is metal you know, the, the overall weight of that 90% of it is the metal it's, it's the, it's the solder powder. It's the SAC 3 0 5. Basically it's, it's tin, silver and copper SAC, 3 0 5. That's the very common alloy for surface my processes. So only 10% of that weight is the flux. But that's by weight. By volume. It's about 50 50. So when you're w so we don't really, like when it comes to solder paste, printing weight means nothing. It's all about volume. It's a hundred percent about volume. And so when you're putting down solder paste and you're filling those holes, if you completely pack. Barrel full of solder paste. You've still only got 50% whole fill because it it's it's, you know, it's only 50% by volume the, the metal, right? So you need a lot more solder paste than just filling that barrel. So this is where we have to get fancy. There's a bunch of different ways to do it. By far the most common one. We handle this is by, over printing. And what this means is when we cut the aperture, we don't cut it just the size of the hole or just the size of the, the annular ring. Even we, we over cut that stensul aperture. So we will print over onto the solder mask. And that way there, we get the extra volume and you'd be like, surprised you can go. Like, I don't know that I've ever gone quite as far as like maybe 10 millimeters, but I've definitely gone probably 5, 6, 7, maybe even eight millimeters beyond this hole
Melissa:Oh, wow.
Chris:and print this huge, huge.
Melissa:a lot.
Chris:It is quite a lot. Like when you consider the scale of a circuit board, it's quite a lot. huge aperture and it sucks it all into the barrel, as long as there's a continuous connection. From that barrel from that plated through hole to the end of that aperture and where we printed, it'll all get drawn into the barrel. It doesn't, it. It's not going to sit out on the side and ball up. It's it's all going to get sucked in together. Solder is really cool like that and because there's so much flux there, it does a nice job of making sure it all combines together and runs in it'll. It'll be kind of neat. If you look at. If you've ever gotten a board from us and you do have some of these hybrid components, these micro USBs, God destroy them. I can't help. We never see those again. Or USB-C check out like the, the solder mask nearby, those through-hole components. You'll almost certainly see the residue from where we overprinted. It's kinda neat. You can actually see that. And, and it's just a little bit of flux residue, but all the metal got sucked into the barrel. And now the nice thing about this is it's just one process, right? Because all you do is you just you just run it through your stencil printer. It puts down the paste job done. You placed the component, run it through the reflow oven. There's literally zero added expense to doing this process, nothing extra you have to do at all. And that is the. Best way to handle things from an efficiency standpoint and consistency and all that kind of stuff. However, it's not always realistic because if you think about it, a lot of times you're going to jam components right up next to that hybrid component. So we don't always have. 3 4, 5, 6 millimeters that we can overprint. So we're, we're oftentimes restricted there. So another technique we'll often use and what we pretty much always use, especially for when we're, when we're doing these hybrid components that we're doing intrusive soldering is we'll double print. So we'll run, we'll run the squeegee blades over the. Board twice. And what that does is it helps to pack that hole even more and make sure that that hole is definitely packed full the risk with that though, is if it gets overfilled of the solder, now you start to make a mess because it'll start that it'll start to drip out the bottom and you'll have, you know, you just make a mess of your machines. You'll make a mess of your conveyors and make a mess of your pick and place machines. It just, it just gets nasty. And if you have to pick up a board, you get it on your hands. If you have to rest it on a tray, for some reason, it gets all over the tray. It's annoying. We, we prefer not to do that, so that's, that's, it's valuable, but it has some trade-offs right. Definitely the coolest process and kind of the most flexible and like, no matter your design, we can take care of it is by dispensing. So having, you know, sometimes this can literally just be a person just pulling a board you know, off the conveyor with a syringe, you know, we, we have nice pneumatic. We have a nice pneumatics, you know, controlled and so we can get consistent volume and everything, but we're literally just holding it by hand and dispensing a little extra solder paste on those locations. We really try to avoid having to do
Melissa:sounds a very time.
Chris:It is very time-consuming, it can be automated. So, they, they are, there are automated solder paste, dispensing machines, and we are almost certainly going to invest in one of these this year because we have a lot of applications for it. We keep seeing more and more and more of these hybrid components. And so there's a very good chance we're going to invest in this equipment later this year. But that's actually something I've been working quite a bit on lately is. Nice supplier for that. And, but the trouble with it is it takes up floor space. You know, it's one more thing to program. It's one more thing to power. There's the capital expenses. There's the time that it takes, right? It's the added time because it's sitting in your line now it's got to do this. Don't get me wrong. It's going to be faster than the pick and place process, but it's still gonna take some time. But then there's maintenance with that too. You're going to gum up your you're going to gum up your, your dispense nozzles and your needles and you know, you gotta, you gotta make sure you're flushing it with this stuff. They call per gel. It's basically like hand lotion. Illustration, I can give for you to kind of, you kind of run this, like lotion, this, this gel through the system and you pack the system with this gel. And that's how you store your, your dispense equipment, you know, overnight or for a few days. And then when you got to run again, now you got to purge out all this gel and repack it with solder paste. It's it's a pain. It's cool, but it's a pain. So ideally you want to be able to overprint The next coolest option. And we haven't actually done much with this, but this is something I'm looking very closely at. And I'm talking to a supplier about getting some is pre-formed solder, preforms. Have you ever heard of solder preforms?
Melissa:No.
Chris:these are like a whole, let me put it this way. It's just, it's just the solder alloy without any flux and it's in any shape and size, you can imagine. So what we want to do, what I'm, what I'm investigating is buying this stuff in little chip sizes. Like you can buy this stuff in little old is a way to fives and it's the exact same size as a resistor capacitor. But it's it comes in tape and reel. And your pick and place machine can place these little preforms next to those hybrid components next to those through whole pins so if you, if you can, if you can't overprint very much, if you can overprint just a little bit, then we can place your USBC port or whatever it might be. And then where we overprinted a little bit, we can place that little oh 6 0 3. So then when it, that gives you the metal you're missing, you've already got enough flux. So then when it gets into the reflow oven, it just melts that down and helps to fill the barrel.
Melissa:Huh?
Chris:It's kind of neat,
Melissa:I'm just trying to imagine it in my head. That's interesting.
Chris:Yeah. Yeah. It'd be just like placing a little low six or three resistor right next to your your USBC through hole pins except it's metal. And it just gets melted down and gets sucked into the barrel. But you can actually get these pre forms in like any shape and size you can possibly think of. They can make a mold and they can make these things for you. Obviously it's going to be expensive to get all that tooled up and to custom order it and everything. It's going to take a long time to get that made, but you can do it. So if you had. You know, if you had the volume to justify it and you had the design need for it, you could do that and they can make it. And like, like I said, like almost any imaginable shape. If you had say, you know, I dunno, I'm trying to imagine an application for it, but if you had like a big giant You know, like surface, mountain nut or something and you couldn't get enough solder in it. You could presumably place like a little donut shaped thing around that surface Mount nut, and that would get sucked into it. Like they can make these things in any shape and size. You can imagine. But obviously there's a significant expense with that, right? Because you know, even the little old 4 0 2 things, they're probably gonna cost like 5 cents a piece. And like the bigger you get, maybe like in an 0805 might be like 20 cents a piece. And if you've got four through hole pins, you've got to fill the barrels of, you know, you're looking at, you know, 80 cents more per device that can, that can add up, especially if you're talking about thousands of boards, you know, you're looking at thousands thousands of dollars worth of. With these preforms. So, you know, that has a downside too. So all of these things, you know, have their challenges right over printing. You don't always have enough room for it. It's definitely the cheapest and most efficient, but sometimes you can overprint double printing. It can make a big mess, you know, it's, it's good. It gets the job done. There's no added expense or anything, a little bit of extra time, but really not much added expense. Dispensing is great. It's the most flexible and kind of the coolest solution, but, you know, there's the capital cost, the floor space, the maintenance, all that kind of stuff. And you know, you know, like we said, the pre forms, they can, the, the individual components themselves, they get expensive as you're trying to pay for these things. So, You know, there's, there's ways of handling all of it. So when you're a designer and you're sitting down and you're looking to, you know, reduce your costs and blah, blah, blah, and make, make these things as manufacturable as possible, if you can find a way to leave room around the components so that we can overprint, that's definitely, you know, chef's kiss, that's the way to do it. That's if you can make it happen, make it happen. That's the way to go. So that is a that's a, that's a tip of the week, right there. Try to leave room so we can overprint on it. It seems like our, our tips are always related to, like, you use the bigger part, leave us enough
Melissa:They're very basic. Really like, yeah,
Chris:really simple. I feel like, I feel Like you know, we get some, sometimes I love it. When, when customers say, Hey, can you look at my design and give me some recommendations? And you know, it's, it's all, it always comes down to give us a little more room. You know, get rid of these, make them we've got plenty of room for them. It's always,
Melissa:a bigger,
Chris:that kind of stuff. yeah. Make it bigger. But that being said, like it's just not feasible, right? Depends on what
Melissa:We're living in a tiny things world.
Chris:That's right. And you know, we're making investments towards being able to handle smaller and smaller devices. Like we got our 3d AOI that can inspect 1005. We've, we're, we're investing in pick and place equipment that can handle metric oh 2 0 1, which is even two sizes smaller than You know, we're, you know, we're, we're doing our can w w we can to try to keep up with it. The truth is if you design something that way, it's very likely it can be built. It might be very difficult to build the first time we might learn from it and, and get better the next time. But it can be done. And it just, there's more expensive. The smaller and tinier and more challenging things are just the more expensive it gets. And cause it's just more challenging, right? You got to invest in better equipment and better people and better tools and all that kind of stuff to deal with them. It's just, that's just how it is, you know?
Melissa:Before you move on do you know what the I'm not sure. Is it physics or chemistry behind the, the metal, the solder going down and being drawn into the hole is, but not like the flux.
Chris:Yeah, It's it's sort of like a. I believe it's sort of like surface tension. I don't know the physics exactly, but I, I often hear it described sort of like a surface tension where it wants to, it wants to bind together. It wants to be together.
Melissa:It's drawn towards the middle
Chris:yeah, it's drawn. Like it's drawn towards itself. Almost. There, there was a. There's an excellent gosh, I can't remember where I read this, but it was about through hole soldering. And why, why barrels fill even, even when you're, you're, you're not, you know, you're fighting gravity and yet it will still slurp its way up a whole sorta like when you dip a paper towel into a glass of water and the, and the water walks up the paper towel, it's the same principles, but I can't remember what that's called. But, yeah. And, and that's what makes solder want to join itself together. And, and I'm a little, I think you and I are a little too young for this, but I guess, I guess, there, they used to like bring mercury to like classrooms and school and stuff to kind of play around with
Melissa:Yeah. I was thinking, I was thinking about mercury, how it kind of like, yeah, you can separate it. And then it like, wants to.
Chris:Yep. It's exactly the same. It's, it's, it's exactly the same, whatever, whatever mercury. Is unique about mercury that makes it do that. It's the same thing with solder. It it's the same exact principles. Yeah. So, well with with one thing I, I didn't get to touch on, but I want to mention regarding a USB-C ports pay close attention to the manufacturer's recommendation for the board thickness for that USB-C port. not all USB-C ports are designed for 1.6 millimeter boards or, oh, 62. If you're using the Imperial measurements. You know, like for example, a lot of the right angle hybrid components from wurth they specifically call out in their documentation, do not go over a 1.3 millimeter thick board because you won't get the hole fill it'll look, you know, it'll you'll this is the other thing. A lot of times these joints are going to look odd. It's not going to look like they're soldered. You're going to see this cavity on the opposite side of the board from the component, because you know, it, it can be difficult to get a hundred percent hole fill. Now, if you look at the IPC documentation on these things and what the recommendation is, they have different recommendations for an intrusive process and how the joint should look. But if, if you could you know, cut away your USBC port and you, you could look underneath it and look at. Those through hole pins. You'll see that the top side of that solder joint is like, perfect. It's absolutely perfect. It's absolutely beautiful. Cause that's where the solder's coming from. Right. And it's gonna, it's gonna finish soldering up there and if it doesn't have enough volume to reach all the way to the bottom, then that's where it's gonna stay. It's not going to, it's not going to migrate down to the bottom. So when you look at that, you might look at it and think, oh man, Worthington screwed up. They didn't, they didn't sufficiently solder my USBC port. Now, trust me, it's soldered. We did it right. We did it according to the manufacturer's recommendation, but you probably went with a 1.6 millimeter board and that port is not designed for a 1.6 millimeter board. It's probably designed for a thinner board. And so that's why, you know, if you think about it, if you take away three tenths of a millimeter, that that can be all the difference in the world of a hundred percent, whole fill in 75%, whole fill. My math might not be quite exact there, but you get the idea. So there's hybrid components, right? And we, we, for the most part, this whole conversation has been talking about hybrid components because that's the most common thing that you're dealing with when it comes to intrusive soldering. However, there is an opportunity to do straight up through hole, only components in a reflow oven, probably not. Relays or, you know, some other kind of fancy component, but you like if you had some high power resistor or a fuse clips or connectors or terminal blocks, all of these things can be intrusively, soldered. They can be soldered in a roof reflow oven if, and this is a very big F the plastic is designed for it. The higher the temperature, the plastic can handle almost certainly the more expensive it is. So oftentimes through whole components are designed with not super low melting plastics. But you know, somewhere in between, we we've seen some really cheap stuff sent to us that was designed for hand soldering only, not designed for selective soldering. Cause you get boards, get much hotter, plastics get much hotter and selective soldering and wave soldering than they do in hand soldering. And we've had the melt on us and it's been a disaster. Gosh, don't get me started, but you know, they make these things for hand soldering and they're great. Really low cost, because then you can, you, you're a hobbyist or you're, you know, you're just working on a little project on your bench. It's great for that kind of stuff, but it's not designed for a manufacturable product. So don't, you know, just be careful when you're specking parts, you know, if you buy them from Alibaba or similar source, just make sure you're, you're getting them with the appropriate plastics that can handle the temperatures for selective soldering or wave soldering and those sorts of things. And they're not designed just for hand soldering. But if you can get them designed for intrusive soldering and you design it, right, you can, you can eliminate all the selective soldering processes altogether, and you can use this, everything. We've just talked about pin and paste and intrusive soldering to solder all of these components. And you're going to have super strong, reliable, solder joints with them. Okay. We've done this with a number of our customers in the past in a current customer. We, we sort of this tiny little board with tons of connectors. It's like, it's like a wiring harness and a circuit board, which is just like all these connectors coming into each other. And it was so hard to selective solder. Cause there was these tiny little diodes in the way. Right. So like when we tried to put our soldering nozzle on the bottom, we were wiping out these diodes and there some resistors nearby. And it was just, it was really, really difficult to selectively solder. So we talked to them and we found out that the connectors they were using were made of this high temp plastic. And I said, Hey, can we try. Intrusively, soldering, this, would you guys be okay with that? And they were, and we tried it and we were successful and we just bang out these things by the thousands now just it's so Great. Yeah. Yeah. it's a great process. So we're super happy to do that. So there's a, there's a big opportunity to have some serious cost savings from an assembly standpoint. If you can convert some of your through-hole components that may necessarily have to be through hole, right? Cause again, the gorilla might touch them. And but you can process them through a surface Mount process and save yourself a bundle of money. And now there's pick and place machines that can even, you can even pick and place these parts and not, you know, we have to hand populate these connectors I was telling you about because they don't come in the appropriate packaging for pick and place. But they're there, you know, there may be opportunities to even use an automated machine to. pick them up out of their packaging, place them on a board, right into the solder paste that we've over printed and right into the reflow oven, zero added expense. You know, it's the same cost as placing a resistor? Well, maybe not exactly the same cost, but close to it, closer to it. Then hand soldering and selectively soldering for sure. So, yeah, lots of opportunities there. So if you take anything out of this, I will say, try, try to leave room to allow us to overprint on those nearby through whole pins. Don't be alarmed if you don't see a hundred percent whole fill on them, it's probably still meeting the IPC spec. And if you can try to find a high temp plastic for your through hole components and we can intrusively solder, that's a great way of handling things.
Melissa:Awesome. Great.
Chris:Thank you very much. Oh, man. I had so much to talk about there. I'm not even sure I can get through my pet peeve. Who am I kidding? Of course I can get through my peeve. I'm ready for it. You ready for this
Melissa:Yeah. I'm looking at the notes and I'm wondering what a liftgate truck is.
Chris:Okay. For those of you who do not know Melissa being one. You ever go to, alright, you go to your Walmart, you go to your, you know, a department store or. And sometimes you have to like drive around back for some reason, or, you know, for whatever reason you end up behind the store, you're behind the grocery store. Right. And you see the trucks and they're backed up right to the building and literally touching the building. They're literally touching the building. Right. And sometimes you see this like rubber padding or this foam padding that's, that's up against the truck that is. a loading dock. And those trucks, you know, that, that building is designed. For a truck to back right up to it and unloaded trailer into the loading dock. Well, not all buildings have loading docks, or if they do, perhaps you need to take delivery of something from a truck on a section of the building that is inaccessible to the loading dock. And this is what a lift gate is. It is basically a hydraulic. Platform on the back of the truck to, to lift and lower pallets without, without a without a loading dock. I, I would say, you know, we get deliveries from, from trucks all the time, you know, probably. Yeah. And when I'm talking about a truck I'm talking about like an 18 Wheeler or something, you know, we're talking about skids, you know, we're talking about pallets worth of worth of parts or machinery or whatever it might
Melissa:Yeah. And not like
Chris:at least.
Melissa:truck.
Chris:Yeah. Not a ups store. Yeah. Well, ups comes to two, sometimes three times a day. FedEx comes twice a day. DHL comes once a day, like w these trucks are coming in and out all the time, but they're just drinking, bringing parcels, right. They're not bringing pallets. They're not bringing machines. When, when we get a delivery of a machine, we may need to bring it to the side of our building that does not have access to the loading dock and the loading dock we share with other businesses in our building. So we don't always have access to it either, even if it wasn't accessible to our loading dock. So we have to have an arrangement with them sometimes. So we have to request a truck with a lift gate. So the back of the trailer, or if it's a box truck. should have a lift gate to. Every time we request this, we tell the shipper, yes, we'll pay for it. 50 bucks, a hundred bucks, whatever it is, you know? Cause we don't, we can't use a loading dock. I would say maybe one out of five times we request for it and pay for it. It actually arrives with a, with a lift gate, maybe one out of five times.
Melissa:Yeah,
Chris:if you say. Like Melissa, if you ordered something from Amazon and it showed up one out of five times, would you continue to order from Amazon?
Melissa:I would not.
Chris:You would not. And yet, how am I guess I don't get it. And then I thought to myself, okay, maybe it's just me. Right. Maybe Christus doesn't know how to deal with shippers and, and, you know, trucking companies. And then recently we took delivery of a bunch of Parts for a new machine we're getting, and it came on a skid and I said, please make sure you send it on a lift gate. Cause this is going to be a heavy, gonna be a heavy pallet. Well, turn off it doesn't arrive even though we paid for it. Right. We're getting a refund. Don't get me wrong. But. Did not arrive. And so I was complaining about this and there's a guy that works at our company and our shipping receiving department. Actually, he does a ton of things, does purchasing. He's a Jack of all trades, Jonathan. He he was like, he was like, oh yeah, Chris, that's, that's super common. That that's totally normal. Cause he was in the shipping industry before he came to Warrington assembly. He's like, this is just what they do. They just always, always, you gotta be kidding me. So then we have to handle. You like, we have to unpack these pallets inside the truck and hand carry, whatever it is that was in the pallet out of the truck. And if it's a machine you're not lifting that machine out of the truck. So you gotta like run around to your neighbors in the industrial park and like, please beg them to, you know, show up with a forklift to get it off the truck for you. And, and that's just so embarrassing having to do all that kind of it's just what, like I get the shipping industry is a tough industry. I get it. So as electronics manufacturer, it's not the easiest, most glamorous thing in the world. And yet we say, w we do what we say we're going to do. Like what's what, what gives
Melissa:yeah, they're probably just put it on the truck and then they realize, all right, we were supposed to have a lift gate for us as well.
Chris:yeah. Oh, well, who's, who's see what happens.
Melissa:It's kind of a lot of work to take it out and put it into another truck and maybe we don't have the truck available and oh, well,
Chris:Yeah. Okay. I'll pay for it, like delay it for a day. And I just, I had a. You know, they're, they're operating on tight margins. I'm sure. I'm sure it's a weird industry and I'm sure that they just, they just beat each other up on cost all the time. And, you know, we, we, we, we, you know, $5,000 shipment, if we can save 10 bucks, we'll pay, you know, $4,990. I'm sure they're dealing with all this kind of stuff all the time. So I get it. But man, it's just so frustrating. It is so frustrating. It's to the point where sometimes trucks have shown up and I've just been like, Nope, come back. You know, I don't know, no lift gate, no delivery. Get out of here, come back with a truck with a lift gate.
Melissa:She just be like, well, you have to get it off the truck yourself. You have to go around. Our neighbors asked them for
Chris:Seriously, mostly. Anyway, that that is a pet peeve that probably almost nobody listening to this can Yeah. Can, can relate to, but it has just been burning me up lately. So I had to get it off my chest. So you go there, you have it intrusive soldering and trucks without lift gates are annoying.
Melissa:If you can relate to a, requesting a look at truck and not receiving one.
Chris:Let us know, contacted pick place, podcast.com and do me a favor. If you get a delivery from a truck and you don't have a, and you don't have a loading dock and they don't have a lift gate send us a picture.. I bet you it'll happen, guaranteed it'll happen. And I bet you, a lot of people listening to this are like, oh, is that why we have to unpack those pallets inside the truck? Every time they come, there's a thing called a lift gate. telling you this is a problem. Yep. So you can email us contact, pick place@podcast.com or tweet at us. We are at CircuitHub and at w.
Melissa:thanks for listening to the pick place podcast. If you like, what you heard consider following us in your favorite podcast app, and please leave us a review on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Chris:Thank you very much, everybody.