Dry Solder Joint
Dry solder joint or dry joints cause lots of problems in electronics repair. It could cause an equipment to malfunction or give intermittent problem that is hard to solve. The dry joint can be easily detectable with our bare eyes or it could only be seend with the help of magnifying glass. Sometimes you can’t even see it with magnifying glass. How do I know? Because after applying fresh solder the equipment have no more intermittent problem.
Rules of thumb about dry solder joint is that whenever you have repaired an equipment that is more than few years old, after replacement of any electronic part, you should at least spend few more minutes to inspect other area for dry joints. The reason for it is you do not want the customer to send the equipment back to you after he has taken it back. This will cause frustration to the customer and you may be get scolded for repeated repair. Just make sure everything is right and burn in test the equipment fully before sending it back to customer. If the repeated call is low then you will have more jobs for you to do.
In certain cases, dry solder joint could also happen to new equipment. I have seen it many times especially the equipment just came out from the contenna. There were cracks and dry joints in some of the equipment. Think of your customer first and surely he or she will continue to send equipment for you to repair if your work is reliable.
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beh
April 1, 2012 at 3:00 am
HI JESTIN
yes the dry joints are very important .also from your two last aticle i have this conclusion that . to find the culprit component in the circuite is not all our the job. the next step is to find a proper component between all fake and bad labeled ones in the market and to find genuine ones are really difficult and correct installation of that good part in the circute finnsh our job in the repair . am i right?
regards
beh
Jestine Yong
April 1, 2012 at 9:41 am
HI Beh,
Actually there are not much fake components-is just that they are low quality. As a rule of thumb if you could get a component that is too cheap than the market value then you have to be take note on that component. Sometimes you just have to test it out and if the components have problem then you have to refer back to the supplier.
Jestine
Galib
April 1, 2012 at 6:35 am
Yes, I always re-solder at dry solder point even it is working perfectly to avoid a quick complain from customer .
Thanks
Jestine Yong
April 1, 2012 at 9:34 am
HI Galib,
That's a good practice!
Jestine
Mircea
April 1, 2012 at 2:27 pm
Because lead-free tin solder dry joints appear
Leslie Pietersen
April 2, 2012 at 2:28 pm
Hi Mr. Yong
I agree with your view on dry joints. I also struggled with a piece of electronic equipment recently. The culprit was some dry joints. I re-soldered it and it worked properly again. My soldering skills however is not of the best quality. I need to work on that.
Thanx for a very helpful and informative blog and website.
Leslie
Jestine Yong
April 2, 2012 at 10:12 pm
HI Leslie,
You can check youtube that have lots of videos on soldering. This could help you to improve on your soldering skill.
Jestine
bob lou
April 9, 2012 at 6:29 pm
l've seen Sony tv's that would not power on...or sometimes they would not stay on. Many times just soldering the connections would fix them. Of course the customer will complain they don't want to pay you just for fixing a bad connection. but it takes time to take the set apart and re-solder many of the connections.
Jestine Yong
April 9, 2012 at 9:10 pm
Hi Bob,
We are professional, the moment the repair work starts we have to charge regardless if it is a small or major fix.
Jestine
RichardF
May 19, 2014 at 10:34 pm
Each of the seven joints below and to the left of the marked joint look a little suspect to me - they all have a tell-tale ring. Contrast any of them with the other joints in the photo - e.g near R605 that does not.
I can see no reason why the indicated joint is more of a dry joint than the others.