The curse of tin whiskers rears its head again

Came for the one minute please, stayed for the ozone.

I remember the transition from Leaded to Lead-free solder well. One of my suppliers delivered a dozen units of hugely complex hardware, all tested by them, but only 1 of the 12 worked on delivery. After some considerable investigation by all concerned, we found many plated through holes in the PCB to be cracked. I recall the manufacturer explaining that because of the higher melting point of lead free solder, when the boards were put through a solder bath, the PCB was in a semi-liquid state. This in turn caused the problems we were experiencing. It took a full year to redesign the entire circuit board as well as the processes to deal with the higher temperatures. To this day, I have kept some leaded solder, 'just in case' (although the lead-free solders are a lot better these days). Great video, and thanks for the reminder of this interesting time in our industrial past!

I want to thank you for introducing me to those little ozone generators. Food lasts soooo much longer now. These things should be built into every good fridge from the manufacturer.

Fun little tip for desoldering small components without an extremely fine tip iron. If you take a piece of solid core Bell wire and cut a 75mm length piece and strip it completely, you can then wrap it tightly around the tip of your iron (with it off and cool obviously) and leave approximately 5mm off the end of your iron, you've now effectively reduced the diameter of your soldering iron temporarily. It has saved my tail many times! Give it a go!

Fifty-odd years ago I worked in Repeater Station Maintenance for British Telecom. We had a lot of failing equipment due to Tin Whiskers inside Germanium Transistors, mostly growing from the tin can. While the short fix was to cut the Shield Lead of the 4 wire transistors (AF117, I think) I did the calculations for new resistors and replaced them with Silicon Transistors. This got written up as an official solution in the TI's (Technical Instructions) and was some of the first Silicon Transistors used in BT. I use Lead-Free solder these days, but stuff with 3% Silver, no Leaching of SMD parts terminals etc, no Whiskers (so far).

I never realised what "tin whiskers" were, I thought it was solder bridges with stray strands shorting out. Everyday is a skool day 😎👍

I have a 25+ year old, large, rack mount HP/Sola industrial UPS that started behaving wonky. I opened it up to diagnose the charge circuit and, to my amazement, the entirety of the inside of the case was filled with a miniature forest of sparkly tin whiskers.

Had a 10kohm short on the contrast button on my then 8 year old Viewsonic LCD monitor 11 years ago. A big blue contrast menu would frequently appear in the middle of my screen and then increase to full contrast and stay there for a few minutes. Eventually opened up the switch and under a microscope saw the short. Scraped it with an x acto and put it back in, still using it to watch this video today. Didn't have any idea what caused it until watching this video. Thanks Clive!

I got one of these fridge ozone generators a few years ago after one of your videos. They worked so good, I bought another for my room.

I use a very similar OZone unit in my fridge also. It's been great to keep the fridge fresh and make fresh produce last longer. This was an interesting video. If I have the same issues I will know what to look for.

Gotta love Clive: No fingernail clippers in Scotland, just Dremels. The switch will get wet in the fridge and under such low currents fail to clean itself. In the tropics I go thru washing machine switches by the bags. Tin whiskers were a short lived issue. Sony and many others had huge issues but solved them quickly. Only repair techs now have to convert repair areas to traditional solder to avoid overheating issues. I am going to order one of them to see if my cheese will last longer. I have used large ozone machines to desinfect whole houses.

I thought this video was about a cat named tin whose whiskers had somehow broken the electronic. I'm not sure if I'm disappointed or not yet.

Tin whiskers are a fascinating phenomenon. Even today it still isn't really understood how they form. There's a good Wikipedia article on them. They even shut down a nuclear power plant once.

Those whiskers could result in cat a strophic conditions.

Some ICs avoid whiskering by using three-layer nickel/palladium/gold plating (I use them in my own projects when available at a reasonable price), but consumer product makers are unlikely to pony up for that. I don't think anybody would have really minded if lead‑free solder was only mandated in incandescent bulbs (apart from oven and heat lamps, where high‑lead solder is necessary to get a suitably high melting temperature; anyhow heat lamps usually have longer lifespans), the internal connections of primary batteries, or similarly disposable items. Power switches normally use silver alloy contacts, while quality signal/logic switches may use gold contacts; but in these cheap buttons, who knows? There were actually some campaigns to move away from lead-acid car batteries at around the same time RoHS came in, but nothing seemed to come of them… (The EU bureaucrats presumably knew full well that they couldn't stand up to the battery industry, so ended up issuing RoHS as just another token “feel-good” gesture. Obviously lithium-ion and NiMH are more expensive and weren't so mature in the early 2000s, but the new sodium-ion batteries should help in the cost regard… CRTs were also exempt, so the last few years of CRT production used lead‑free solder despite containing far more lead in the glass anyway.)

I've been impressed how much you do without something to secure items. I've got 3 different types of vices and I'm still wrestling with stuff, always needing a third hand.

I was squirming watching you remove the switch. Thanks for cutting my torment short.

I think I've mentioned this in your comments before, but I was once witness to the aftermath of a many thousands of KVA APC Symmetra UPS exploding and taking out the fuses on the local substation in the process from tin whiskers growing, a byproduct of them cost cutting by tin plating the high voltage bus bars, bus bars which had been plated with nickel in prior units.

When i was still in an Army Project Office, we spent innumerable hours dealing with making sure we did NOT have lead free solder on components, leads, etc. We dealt with missiles that could spend years in storage, but work perfectly when needed. RoHS was a major problem, and meant that every part had to be certified as not using pure tin solder or coatings. Parts would sneak through, or manufacturers would change processes without proper notification. Between RoHS and moving to plastic encapsulated microcircuits from ceramic components as ceramics were mostly phased out, we had our hands full making sure we had systems that would work when required.

Careless tin whiskers