Quote:
Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz
Jim,
We solder all joints. Not that they need it but we lost a World Championship to Beatty a long time ago because one of our crimps let go. We even solder the battery terminals.
There is an interesting NASA study done on lead free solders, printed a few years back. They found that the lead free grows conductive crystals with time and eventually short out adjacent circuitry on printed circuit boards. I have been careful to watch for that in my day job and have found hundreds of failed joints and shorted traces over the years. But lead solder also has failures, most often in temperature control. I just replaced a main relay in my daughter's Honda for defective joints.
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*cough2001* I can imagine that the terminals used now are much more robust, though. Our electrical mentor told us about how his company normally uses lead-free solder, but they have to use leaded solder in products shipped to the middle east because they found that the dust and smog causes lead-free solder to grow crystals like you described.