[SOLVED] Solder fluss, make your own or buy brand? if so which brand when? things to avoid?

[David_]

Hello.

I've thought about where to place this a long while and plese move it if I'm in the wrong place but Analog design was the best section I could think of since the solder used can impact the circuits performans and cause excessive leakedge and such.

A while back I bought a big 1L bottle solder fluss which worked okey, now that the bottle is empty I need to find out how I will percure my fluss. That bottle was the first fluss I bought and I really like the idea of buying powdered pine resin or rosin(colophony) and making my own but the opinion on what the best solder fluss and worst solder fluss on the internet differ so much so I felt that discussing it here would be a good idea.

I'm tempted to buy some resin and try to make my own fluss/flux, does anyone have any experience with this. And is "No-clean flux" bad or not?

I don't want to make to big of a fuss about solder fluss but I have read things that makes me think that I should be careful when choosing solder fluss but I have no experience and I rather hear your thoughts rather then spending money blindly.

Oh and for what am I going to use it for, for one part general soldering. wire to wire, through-hole PCB and god knows what. I have soldered a 1meter wisp for blending malts with a drill/screw-driver machine malts for brewing, it worked great.
But I will also solder LQFP and other fine pitch smd.

I really like to here your opinion on solder fluss/flux.

Regards

Regards

- - - Updated - - -

I forgot what made me write this thread to begin with.
There a lot of different resin/rosin out there, Pine Gum Rosin, Allepo Resin, natural pine and similar and they are advertised in some cases for soldering but mostly as incense, gymnastics sports ballet varnish or used with instruments like violins. And there are powder, flakes solid blocks and all between, is there any kind of rosin that is best suited for solder fluss?

 

[dick_freebird]

I'd just stick with a good brand of rosin core solder
(like Kester 44). And clean the residue to eliminate it
as a leakage contributor; then you don't care so much
about what it was, because it's now gone.

You might look for info on whether the flux is "non-
nutritive" to fungus and mold. The military calls this out
as a requirement on anything electronic. I can see why;
one job I had in the '80s, we were building graphics display
engines and had a whole batch go bad from the solder flux
letting something grow in storage and causing too much
leakage for the boards to work right.

But proper cleaning and maybe con-coat would make the
flux qualities a "don't care" pretty much.

 

[David_]

That feels as good advice, I'll look in to it.
The hole "make your own solder fluss" is attractive but for reasons not directly obtaining to electronics, its always fun to make it your self.
But I don't feel that I should spend more time on this subject and I will do as proposed.

Thanks.