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My cousin in Reno opened my eyes about cleaning flux off a modded PCB before it eats the traces
So my cousin was visiting from Reno two weeks ago and he used to do board level repair on arcade cabinets, and he saw my modded controller sitting on the bench with white crust all around the solder points. He grabbed it, flipped it over, and asked how long the flux had been sitting there. I said maybe three weeks since I swapped the sticks. He said that's long enough for the flux to pull moisture and start eating the pads. He showed me the greenish haze around two of my joints and I felt sick. Now I keep a bottle of 91 percent isopropyl and a toothbrush right next to the iron. Does anyone else clean after every single joint or am I overdoing it now?
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mary_wells15d ago
Honestly that greenish haze your cousin spotted is probably just leftover rosin tinted by heat, not active corrosion, because the pads would need constant moisture to actually break down. Plenty of old arcade boards ran for years with flux crust all over them and still work fine today, so three weeks sitting on a bench is nothing. Cleaning every single joint is overkill unless you are doing a lot of heat or using water soluble flux, and even then a quick wipe at the end of a session does the same job.
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