Thanks, the thing is, ever since we’ve started cutting this PCB copper , we have been getting blow-ups in the vicinity of the componentry near the pad cut.
At first we were using a dremel to saw through the copper, but we suspected that copper filings were getting under/along the 1812 ceramic capacitors etc and causing shorts….so now we’ve changed to using the scalpel instead, and now the failures involve the LNK302 strangely blowing up. We never used to get these failures before we started cutting this copper.
We wear ESD straps when we do the cutting....of course, we earth the strap with one of those yellow ESD plugs into the mains, -but of course, we dont know if the building installers actually connected our mains earth of this building to earth, like they should.