Wave soldering without accurate board-wave data is a sure prescription for consistent defects, production crises and downtime. Experientially, production professionals understand this - they see the rework staff at their workstations and bear the brunt of management’s goals for throughput and quality.

This is true despite Herculean efforts in thermal management, wonderful progress in wave solder machine quality, and the continuous development of flux and solder chemistries. Yet ask a manufacturing engineer from where the majority of his assembly defects come and more often than not he’ll point to his wave machines.

So, legions of rework staff work every day, every shift, solely to correct defects off the production line. Rather than being viewed as compensatory activity for production failures and therefore something to be exorcised, current levels of rework are often deemed "acceptable" as part of the production process itself. The net result, as we shall see here, is significant exaggeration of production costs and serious under performance in wave soldering.

For example, adjusting your preheaters can never eliminate bridging caused by too long a dwell. Likewise for skipping caused by too shallow an immersion depth. The study results presented here show that the majority of existing wave solder defects can only be eliminated through accurate, direct measurement and control of your board’s interaction with the wave.

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