Distilled water won't leave any residue, and as long as you wash your detergent off, your boards will be residue free.As a starting place, for most small electronics soldering, 1/32 inch (.03) rosin-cored, 60/40 (tin-lead) or 63/37 solder should work fine. Distilled water won't have anything in it but water, so you don't have to worry about any minerals, metals, etc that may be in tap water. If you do rinse your board off with water, regardless of how you clean them, don't use tap water. The only reason to use no-clean flux is if you are worried about some residue still remaining after the cleaning process, such as under SMD packages. Alternately, you can use a water soluble flux and just wash it off with distilled water which is far easier than using traditional or no-clean fluxes. I have heard that manufacturers use a similar process that uses detergents, mechanical scrubbers, and water jets to remove flux, then they either bake them in a low temperature oven (say 60C) or they spray it with compressed air to evaporate all of the water off of the board. Dish detergent and hot distilled water, on the other hand, almost always get all of the residue off, especially if you leave it to soak for five or ten minutes. I usually scrub my PCBs with a cotton swab doused in alcohol to get rid of the large blobs of flux, unfortunately even 90-99% IPA seems to always leave a sticky, foul residue, (especially with "no-clean" fluxes) even with mechanical brushing. It's also environmentally safe to use alcohol and dish detergents. A lot of the solvents used for flux certainly are not safe to handle, alcohol and detergent are really the only things that won't give you cancer or liquefy your brain. As long as it leaves no residue, or as long as you rinse it off well with distilled water, and you allow it to dry/bake at a low temperature (or blast it with compressed air), you shouldn't have any issues with it, I never have had any issues myself. In truth, there is really no reason to not use a detergent, it's really just a gel consisting of hydrocarbon chains with hydrophillic and hydrophobic components, historically manufactured from some kind of fat and lye. Some people "might" object to it, but I have had far better success with detergents over alcohol or anything else. I have had good luck with "hand-safe" detergents. You can use certain dish detergents provided that A: they are not overly acidic/corrosive (rosin/flux itself is fairly acidic) and B: they don't leave any residue/salts. There is a discussion of the Poly-Clens suggestion at Hackaday. Poly-Clensīurton Lang (mentioned above) also suggests, as a flux cleaner, the Poly-Clens product, though this may not be available globally, and can damage some plastics. These are apparently the same three chemicals used in a commercial flux cleaner made by MG Chemicals.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |