I've ordered Kester's No-Clean Sn96.5/Ag3/Cu0.5 stuff (and ChipQuik's equivalent in pastes), which came recommended by others -- but if anyone wants to tell me I'm totally getting the wrong thing, now's the time. =P
@azonenberg@yngmar yeah, I tend to run through a Kester spool about once every ten years; I wind up spending a lot more on flux or paste than on those; but they are super frontloaded
(if cost is an issue, I'm sure you can find someone who will cut you off a chunk of their spool; those things are a pound of solder and last a long time)
@ktemkin I stock two sizes and the 150 μm spool will probably outlive me.
The fatter spool will probably last me until my daughter is in middle school.
Flux is cheap and I go through... idk maybe a syringe every year or two? Paste I generally get close to using up a 15 or 30g syringe by the time it expires.
@azonenberg syringes of paste I tend to throw out because they're gotten crufty or expired, rather than because I finish them
paste jars I'll often finish, but that's likely because I use more than I could and wind up throwing some away after stencil'ing -- I tend to figure it'll expire first otherwise
@azonenberg honestly a lot of them work well after their expiration, like flux -- I use them on non-critical boards with larger components and they're still useful
whether I tap into the jars really depends if I'm making prototypes for a bunch of colleagues and myself or just for myself -- but I generically find syringes harder to keep clean and find that form factor tends to go off faster
@ktemkin With TS391 I find that around the expiration date it seems more putty-like and less flow-y than it should, like it's losing solvent or increasing in viscosity. That's when I get rid of it.
A new syringe of my usual paste is $16.95 at Digikey. If I'm putting several hundred dollars of parts on the board and I think there's even a 5% chance of a bad paste print screwing it up, it's worth getting new paste.
I use pretty much exclusively ChipQuick solder wire and fluxes (specifically SMD291NL gel flux which is rebranded Amtech SynTech-LF-TF) and have been pretty happy with all of it.
@yngmar I've gotten other people's recommendations, but haven't tried them yet, so I don't have personal ones
but from what I've heard, Kester's new non-low-cost no-clean stuff is supposed to be pretty darned easy to work with -- it just doesn't result joints that are as visually pleasing
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