"Thanks Warren. What do you mean by 'wave soldering'?"

Wave soldering refers to a process used in mass production of circuit boards. It's a simple idea, and frankly surprising that it works at all.

A circuit board, stuffed with all its components is suspended component side up over a pool of molten solder. The distance is very small. Then, a mechanical device produces a wave in the molten solder pool. The crest of the wave travels the length of the pool and back, and as it does, it solders every joint on the circuit board at once.

Pretty neat stuff, but you can see that since all the joints are done at once, the possibility of a poor connection on one or more of the joints is quite real.


-tp