Yahoo Groups archive

Homebrew PCBs

Index last updated: 2026-04-28 23:05 UTC

Message

flux on Dumbo's tracks--I'm a fool to do your dirty work, oh ye-ah!

2016-11-10 by alan00463@...

Recall that I had chemically plated my board with bottom tracks using something like Tinnit chemical that I had got in powder form from allelectronics.com.

Today while soldering through-hole resistors, I discovered the soldering
iron burns the tinnit off the tracks. YUCHH! After the resistor was soldered in, I experimented to see if I could melt fresh solder onto the tracks to cover over the exposed copper. Didn't work. I first had to put rosin soldering flux onto the track, and then apply solder to it. (But before that, because the room in which I solder has the window open, the air was in the 50's F and my flux was gelatinous. So I had to first heat it up in a bowl of boiling water 5 min. or so until I could dip a toothpick into the flux and have a drop of flux cling to the toothpick.)

Then I discovered I could get the leftover flux off my tracks by spraying isopropyl alcohol onto the tracks and wiping it with a q-tip (cotton swab).

If anybody has a trick to avoid this mess, I'm all ears. (Dumbo, get it?)


Attachments

Move to quarantaine

This moves the raw source file on disk only. The archive index is not changed automatically, so you still need to run a manual refresh afterward.