Re: gEDA-user: TO-92 Best Practices

[Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 03 March 2010, Larry Doolittle wrote:
>Al -
>
>On Wed, Mar 03, 2010 at 10:18:59AM -0500, al davis wrote:
>> Along that line ...  You could get what they call "reading
>> glasses" from a supermarket.  Get the strongest ones they have.
>> They make great magnifying glasses.
>
>I didn't need them in college, but I sure need them now!
>
>> You really should wear eye protection while soldering anyway.
>
>Right.  Funny story.  We had a big safety audit here a few
>months ago.  Lots of new "work practices", including mandated
>eye protection -- safety glasses -- when soldering.  So ..
>I start doing some rework on a particularly tricky section
>of an 0603-scale board.  A flock of managers cruised by and
>said -- Hey! you don't have safety glasses on!  I show them
>that I don't get any benefit from safety glasses when I'm
>soldering under a 10X microscope.
>
>    - Larry

Nice, if there is room for the microscope, the soldering iron and the solder, 
all in the field of view.  Panasonic, 10 years ago, didn't succeed in doing 
that, so I was stuck using about a 6" magnifying lens, in a parallelogram 
suspension system, with the smallest circular hot cathode fl lamp wrapped 
around it.  Mostly replacing bypass caps on digital boards, using a GC 
'tweezer' style double soldering iron plugged into a powerstat and turned 
down to about 60 volts to control the temp.  These caps were surface mounted, 
and crap.  The size of a lead pencil eraser and smaller, I started dumping 
the old ones into a 3 pound coffee can thinking they might be recyclable alu 
at some point.  By the time I'd retired, we had the 3rd can started...

Panasonic of course made their own caps, and few if any of the quality 
replacements could be parked on their footprint, so it was a severe 
stretching of the definition to call 30 hours a week doing that 'fun'.  I get 
a back ache between my shoulder blades from hunching up to that glass just 
thinking about it.  But when the alternative is replacement boards from the 
Russian Mafia in New Jersey at many hundreds each, or replace the $4k to $13k 
machine at 6 month intervals, it only had up to 27 such boards in it.  Their 
tech in the New Jersey shop was a guy named Alex, from Russia, and it wasn't 
unusual to bypass the phone menu by saving time & asking to for the 'Russian 
Mafia', it was simpler than trying to figure how to pronounce his last name 
using an accent the New Jersey girls understood.  They had more than one Alex 
it seemed.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)

Typo in the code


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