Even Cleaner Cleaning With Cleaning Expert Mike “Mr. Clean” Konrad

We're very excited to have Mike Konrad, founder of Aqueous Technologies as well as host of his own podcast, Reliability Matters, back on the show.

We first had Mike on the show to discuss the history of board cleaning, the electronics the industry's transition to primarily using no-clean flux, and why more and more companies are reintroducing board cleaning back into their assembly process.

Mike recently reached out to us and offered to talk about the 2018 changes to the IPC cleanliness standards and why adoption of the new standard has been slow at best due to the lack of understanding of the standard's details. We of course jumped at the opportunity...

We hope you enjoy this episode that is most definitely more entertaining than watching grass grow. 

Listen to Chris on the Being and Engineer podcast 

pickplacepodcast.com

Transcript

0:08

​Chris: welcome to the Pick we talk about electronics, manufacturing and everything related to getting the circuit board into the world. This is Chris Denny with Worthington.

Melissa: 0:17

and this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub,

Chris: 0:20

Welcome back Melissa.

Melissa: 0:21

back Chris.

Chris: 0:23

Thanks. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.

Melissa: 0:25

Yeah, it's been been a couple weeks, I

Chris: 0:28

Been a couple weeks, sorry for the mismatched schedule. It's probably for our mental health better that we don't try to stick to in every two week schedule. I feel like,

Melissa: 0:36

true. Better content,

Chris: 0:37

better content and, and, and then you're trying to rush things out, you know?

Melissa: 0:42

Better for Melissa's mental health, for editing things, not the day before.

Chris: 0:47

And Chris's mental health trying to prepare something for the day, you know, the hour before it was supposed to start recording. Oh, I should probably write down some notes about this, huh.. Some, some cool things been going on. I was invited to be a guest on a different podcast called Being an Engineer, which is, which is actually like totally weird for me because this show has like some legitimate engineers on it, you know, like. Like the, so, the episode that I was I was on, was released on December 16th on the Being and Engineer podcast. You can find that on Apple Podcast and everything else. And I guess we could probably include a link to the show notes or in the show notes to it. But the very next episode was this guy David O, who's the former flight director for the Mars Curiosity Rover from NASA And I'm like, hold up, hold up a second. You're supposed to get all your subscribers the week before and then have me on,

Melissa: 1:46

you're supposed to switch up.

Chris: 1:48

switch that up. Anyway, I don't know.

Melissa: 1:51

Yeah, I haven't listened. I haven't listened to that. I'll give that a listen to,

Chris: 1:54

Yeah, I think I think people will quickly forget about December 16th episode and listen to December 20 thirds and move on from there. But anyway yeah, it was fun. So the cool thing was it's Aaron. Aaron Monk. and he is really more of like, what do I like a mechanical engineer, really more than electrical engineer or manufacturing engineer. He's more of a mechanical design engineer. They design machines and automation and stuff like that. And so his questions were really interesting because he was so naive to the topic of electronics manufacturing and it was really fun to just sort of like, take that completely, you know, unmolded piece of clay and turn it into something that was. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. So tune into that. And yeah, so speaking of struggling to get content out, we, you know, we it's both of us have so much going on right now, but we got an, we got an awesome email from this week's guest recently. And we had him on a previous episode, Mike Conrad was on our show what did I say? Episodes 23 and 24, I think, or 22 and 23. Somewhere, somewhere around there. We could probably include a link to those episodes in the show notes as well, if you wanna go back and listen to that, where we talked about cleaning in the past, but things are changing. Now to be fair, things did change even when he was on the show last in, in the world of cleaning and electronics manufacturing and, and how all that's related, the. You know, the, the standards of cleanliness had changed already, but Mike was noticing in the industry that not a lot of people were paying attention to it, and thought it might be a good topic. And I was like, Hey, we'll, you know, at this point we'll talk to we'll talk to some grass that's growing, so why not So why not, why not get Mike back on the show? So, with that beautiful introduction, I would like to welcome our, our guest, Mike, Mr. Clean Conrad. Welcome.

Mike: 3:42

Oh my God. I don't know what I, I've, I've gotten a lot of compliments, you know, being an expert in the cleaning business, but being compared to a

Melissa: 3:50

more interesting than.

Mike: 3:52

is, is amazing. This is, you've made my year,

Chris: 3:56

I reach high. I reach high Mike. You know, I, yeah. So, welcome back to the

Mike: 4:00

that come with a little plaque? You know, better than growing grass or

Chris: 4:03

I'll get you a certificate. I'll get you, I'll, yeah, I'll, I'll send you a facsimile of a, of a certificate.

Mike: 4:08

Fair enough.

Chris: 4:09

So, Mike, just remind the listeners in case they're new to the show. If you don't mind sharing your background and, and what you do today and how you got there. Just, you know, your brief elevator pitch of who you are. I guess

Mike: 4:20

Sure. I, yeah, I committed a very heinous crime, and the judge said, you can either do 20 years in jail or you can work in the EMS space for the rest of your life. And that was a better deal

Chris: 4:29

I think that might be a false equivalency.

Mike: 4:32

Yeah. Exactly. No, I, I I founded a company called Aqueous Technologies. Aqueous, of course, means water, duh. And so it's not a far leap to figure out what we do. We build cleaning equipment for the electronics industry. We, our machines clean circuit assemblies after reflow, we build testers to show you how clean the boards are and peripheral

Chris: 4:53

more on that later.

Mike: 4:55

Yeah. So I, and I started This world in 1985 when I was four and child labor and,

Chris: 5:03

I was one fun fact,

Mike: 5:05

Yeah, yeah. Fun fact. I started in 85 and then I, I designed some equipment for my employer at the time and came up with what I thought were really cool, NextGen ideas and they weren't interested. So I had a little tantrum and I left and, and I started my own company in 1992.

Chris: 5:21

and went home.

Mike: 5:22

and here we are.

Chris: 5:23

Yeah.

Mike: 5:23

All those years.

Chris: 5:24

So it's topical too. Worthington Assembly. And, and by extension, CircuitHub just purchased the piece of equipment from Aqueous Tech. We were, we'd, we'd been, you know, w everything that Worthington and CircuitHub focuses on is, is automation. We're not shy about admitting that, and we have no You know, some people hear the words automation, they think, you know, taking away jobs. And we have found the total opposite in our experience. The more automation we introduced to our company, the more people we're a able to hire because of the more work we can take on and yada, yada, yada. But we're always looking to automate everything. And one of the things we were trying to automate was the cleaning of our stencils and our squeegee blades and all these sort of things that are associated with stencil printing. And in addition, Mike, so Mike mentioned that they aqueous tech makes equipment for cleaning finished assemblies. They also make equipment for cleaning. I'll call 'em process materials, you know, things that, you know, it's not necessarily something you're gonna ship to a customer, but you need to get it clean in the meantime. And so they had a nice piece of equipment for us and we purchased that. And Mike, you said it's shipped yesterday, is that correct? You shipped this? It's on, it's on its way. Is that right,

Mike: 6:30

Yeah, I think so. I, I, I don't know. I have no idea if that's what they told you.

Chris: 6:36

we ordered it, we ordered it like Friday. So I, I don't think so.

Mike: 6:39

no. Probably not.

Chris: 6:41

probably not.

Mike: 6:42

Probably not. No. I think we're actually shut down between Christmas and New Year,

Chris: 6:45

oh, very

Mike: 6:46

yeah, it's on its way. Check us in the mail,

Chris: 6:48

Yeah. I hope everybody's hope everybody at Aqueous Tech is enjoying their time off

Mike: 6:52

We are. Thank

Chris: 6:52

And not spending time listening to their boss gab, on and on about cleanliness standards.

Mike: 6:57

Yeah. I don't, I don't think they're listening to this show today or, or any other thing I've

Chris: 7:01

they are loyal listeners. My understanding is that the numbers we get in Southern California off the charts and they're all focused in, in that area that you're

Mike: 7:08

Yeah. But now that we have the order, the, the numbers are gonna drop

Chris: 7:11

Oh, okay. Alright, So we're gonna go from 10 listeners to four,

Mike: 7:16

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're dropping 60%

Chris: 7:20

yeah, . But anyway, I'm Mike, if you don't mind, I'm gonna read the email you sent me word for word and I, cuz I think it's a great way to kind of kick things off about what today's show is gonna be about. So, word for word it, it went i p c dramatically. And I P c, in case you're not familiar with I P C, we had a, a member, a couple members of the I P C on our show previously, but for lack of a better term, they're sort of the, the group that sets the standards for electronics manufacturing. That's a gross oversimplification for it, but you get the idea. Anyway. I p c dramatically changed the cleanliness standards in 2018. Adoption of the new standard has been slow at best due to the lack of understanding of the standards details. Shocking somebody not reading details. I'm shocked., basically, I p c took away the old pass fail limit and replace them with an objective evidence protocol. And you put objective evidence in quotes. I can't wait to pick that one apart. As you know, most engineers simply want to be told a number to hit. That's not true at all, Mike. I never wanna number to hit then. Absolutely not. Yeah. and that number is now gone. Assemblers must now prove that post reflow contamination on their assemblies will not lead to a failure. Which I'm, I mean, I'm already breaking out in a sweat just reading that sentence. In actuality, any amount of contamination is now allowed. As long as the assembler can prove it's not harmful. So that, that was Mike's email and I'm like, oh man, I have so many questions about this personally for myself because we're trying to run a manufacturing operation here. Right. But also for our listeners, so if you'll recall, Mike, we do, we absolutely do have manufacturers who listen to the show, no doubt. And many of them have written in and, and we're happy to have 'em as listeners, but by far the vast majority of our listeners are the people hiring manufacturers. So they're the people on the design side, they're, they're the customers. They're the ones where you say assemblers must prove that post reflow contamination on their assemblies will not lead to a failure. They're the ones that I have to prove this to

Mike: 9:16

Right,

Chris: 9:17

So I think we wanna, we wanna gear this conversation towards them more so than, than towards manufacturers. But obviously it's, it, the two are gonna blend together. This whole show is about how we get finished assemblies in the world, right. So, The ipc. So, I believe you're referring to the J standard, right? J S T D 0 0 1. That's

Mike: 9:35

that's correct.

Chris: 9:36

that's how you would google J dash sst d dash 0 0 1. That's gone through many revisions. The current revision released in 2018, as I understand, is revision h is

Mike: 9:47

Yeah. Actually G was, G was amended in 2018.

Chris: 9:52

Okay.

Mike: 9:53

Section eight of G was amended in 2018. Section eight covers. Cleaning and cleanliness, quantification. And then h came out about a year ago and h memorialized those changes. So it wasn't an amendment, it was now a standard part of,

Chris: 10:07

I memorialized. That means it w it was put to put to death. That means we don't have to worry about it anymore, is that correct?

Mike: 10:12

it the memorialized meaning? It's, it's not, it's not an addendum. It is, yeah. Nice, nice, nice thinking. I like your, I'm with you there, but No, no, no. We're, we're, it's, it's part of our world now and it's, it's not, it's not based on an addendum. It's now part of the, the regular standard in

Chris: 10:30

Okay. All right. Very good. Very good. So if you, if you don't mind can you, can you bring us up to speed? Let's, let's have a, a let's have a, a what's, what's the, what's the word I'm looking for? You know how Wayne's world, they go

Mike: 10:44

Right,

Chris: 10:44

and they go, they go back to the

Mike: 10:46

You can hear that in your head, right.

Chris: 10:47

yeah, exactly. What, what, let's go back to the past. What had the standard been before this amendment, before let's say, you know, standard A, B, C, D, E, F, F what did that say about cleanliness and, and what was everybody trying to achieve back then? And the whole industry was built around? And, and if you could just bring us up to speed on, on what that was first, before we get into what, how did it change?

Mike: 11:09

Yeah. I love to do that. I love to, to get in the time machine and

Chris: 11:13

Yeah. There.

Mike: 11:14

how things were, cause then it makes a little bit more sense where we are today. So the, the original

Chris: 11:19

the flux capacitor.

Mike: 11:20

ex Exactly. Back to the future. The original pass fail limit was based on a specific type of cleanliness test called a rose tester. R o s e An

Chris: 11:31

And didn't that stand for

Mike: 11:32

Yeah, resistivity of solvent extract.

Chris: 11:35

Oh, great.

Mike: 11:36

That's which just makes no sense, right? I mean, I mean, to the layman, you, you can't hear the, hear the full acronym and understand what it does, but it's a cleanliness tester in, in. As they were referred to and the powers that be at the time thought that okay, we need, we need to come up with a number based on this rose test. And if you exceeded that number, your boards were dirty. If you were at or lower than that number, your boards were clean. Okay? Fair enough. That's what engineers want. That's what people want, right? We want a very binary selection. Go, no go. You know, black, white, up, down, left, right, pass, fail. Give us a number. And, and we had that number and that number was 10. Doesn't really matter what 10 means, but just for the sake of this conversation. But I don't wanna go two-fold too far down the rabbit

Chris: 12:26

that's fine.

Mike: 12:27

So 10 and the pro, so 10.01. Your boards are dirty. Don't ship 'em. 9.9. Whew. Almost had a dirty board ship it. So the problem was that those, that number was derived in the 1970s.

Chris: 12:46

Okay, so this could have been, this could have been nasa, it could have been some large defense contractor. Somebody, some group of engineers originally came up with something that everybody agreed, okay, we

Mike: 12:57

Yeah. However, it, it actually came out of the, the mill standards,

Chris: 13:01

Yeah. So

Mike: 13:02

probably 65, 36 or 2000 a weapons

Chris: 13:05

Okay. So real quick for listeners who aren't familiar, the mill standard was kind of the, the, the military had to set up some standards for what they would accept for, for assemblies. And they, they, they would go to the Worthington Assemblies of the world and say, here, anything you build for us has to meet these standards. And then they didn't want to be the what's the word I'm looking for? You know, they didn't wanna have to con continue to set these standards and control the standard. And then I P C sort of stepped in and now they, they kind of, you know, shepherd the standard, so to

Mike: 13:34

Right, right. Yeah. I p c kind of started the standards process based on the existing military standards and then they became industry-wide standards. Right. And the, the problem was that these numbers came out in the 1970s when the numbers came out. The people who floated the numbers, from what I understand from history, may be an urban legend, but I, I believe it's true cuz it makes sense. They were, they were infuriated that the number made it into a standard. because that number was really never meant to be a standard. They were just floating. Well, you know, we think this might be a clean number, but, but they never intended it to be universal. You know, like God's 11th commandment, you know, thou shall be less than 10 and, and don't murder people, right? It's, it was, they said, well, whoa, whoa, whoa. We didn't mean it for the whole world, but it got embraced and it, it just became part of the historical

Chris: 14:33

But, but it was, it was effective. I mean, that it had, people had must have kept using it because it was working.

Mike: 14:39

it was

Chris: 14:40

wasn't working, people would've abandoned it.

Mike: 14:42

Yeah, it was working for some, but, but, you know, think about this. You come to me in 1970, you, you pull up in your Chevy Nova. You, you are listening to David Bowie on your

Chris: 14:52

it's gonna be a Dodge Charger. I mean, let's, let's be honest, it's gonna be a Dodge Charger.

Mike: 14:55

a Dodge Charger. Okay? Fair enough. All right. A muscle car. So you, you pull up in your Dodge Charger listening to your eight track tape on your way to build a whole bunch of through hole. With axial leaded components and dips and things like that, right? Parts that are the old days were parts were very far apart. The leads in those parts were very far apart. And you said, Mike, how clean do I need to have these boards? And I tell you 10.

Chris: 15:23

Sure.

Mike: 15:23

And then NASA comes up to me and says, we're building this spacecraft that's going to go to Mars. It can't fail. Or Boeing comes up to me and says, we're building a guidance system, uh uh, ILS approach system on a commercial aircraft. It can't fail or 400 people will die. How clean do my boards have to be? And I go 10, I tell nasa, 10, I tell, I tell Boeing 10, and you're building, you know, guitar pickups or something. And I'm gonna tell U 10, right? All of you have a different cost of failure. All of you are doing are, are using different components. All of you have a different climactic in-use environment, yet I tell you all the same number 10. And that really never made sense ever because I would like to think that, God forbid if I ever have to have a pacemaker in my chest that maybe that was clean to one maybe, you know, maybe my Amazon Echo speaker was clean to 20,

Chris: 16:25

Yeah.

Mike: 16:25

cuz one has a higher cost of failure than the other.

Chris: 16:28

Are you sure?

Mike: 16:29

well it depends what song's playing, I

Chris: 16:31

I mean, let's, the David Bowie a track sound pretty

Mike: 16:34

Yeah, it was pretty, pretty gnarly in the day. So, so the, the old standard never considered the c climactic in-use environ., which I'll get to in a moment cuz that turned out to be a, a, a, a pretty major influence today. Less so yesterday. It didn't consider the component types. It didn't consider the cost of failure. It didn't consider the standoff heights of the component. It didn't consider a lot of factors that have turned out over time to be proven relevant factors. We just had 10

Chris: 17:03

let me, let me pause you there for a second. So there, there's this number, we'll just call it 10, right? It is, it is in a rose test. And so the rose test has, is, is somehow defined, right? Somebody defined this is what a rose test is, and this is how you generate a number from this rose test. And that number shall be less than 10 in order to ship it, right? So, so I could, I could go to the Mike Conrads of the world, the aqueous techs of the world and be like, Hey, look you know, Amazon is asking me to build their echoes. Can you, can you ship me a machine that does this rose test and gives me a number? And there were, there were suppliers doing these sorts of things, right? There were people making these kinds of instruments where I could, I could, they would say, if you follow this process, it'll give you a number. And I can, I can generate a report and I can send that report with my boards and see, look, we cleaned it to the rose test. We're under the number. and everybody's happy, Amazon's happy. And then Boeing is, you know, the, the naive engineer at Boeing might be happy too, but then eventually somebody comes along and says well, you know, that that plane that went down in the Philippines, you know, horrible tragedy. I, I think they never discovered it, but we, we had a rose test on those circuit boards too, and they all said they were under 10

Mike: 18:19

Yeah. Well, that's what happened.

Chris: 18:21

failure. And hundreds of people lost their lives.

Mike: 18:23

Yeah. That's what happened. Not, not with Boeing, thankfully,

Chris: 18:26

of course. Yeah. Yeah. I understand.

Mike: 18:27

as time marched on, The, our industry, the electronic manufacturing industry, started seeing an increased amount of failures while that happened for two reasons. Number one, so lemme go back 1970s from the beginning of time for circuit assemblies, fifties, sixties, somewhere around there. Right. There was certain protocols to build a board and, and, and to oversimplify it, we get the boards made, the bare boards made. We, we stuff components in them. Run 'em through a soldering process and clean them. Those are the major pillars, right? Board fab stuff. The components solder the components to the board. Clean up the mess you made. That was the protocol. Since the beginning of electronics time in the, in 1989, the world entered this giant global treaty called the Montreal Protocol. To eliminate certain chemicals from production. Those chemicals were chloroflurocarbons CFCs. Why? Why does anyone care about that? Because we used those chemicals to clean circuit boards that almost every circuit board was cleaned and free on, or tri chlor ethane. And, and the whole world got together. Every un member country agreed to this in 1989, that by 1999 we were not gonna make that stuff anymore.

Chris: 19:53

Okay.

Mike: 19:54

And everyone freaked out like, oh my God, how, how are we gonna clean the only people, you know, we're gonna be third world countries, cuz all the third world countries are gonna move up to our position because they're gonna o be the only people working. Right. And of course, that didn't happen. And necessity being the mother of invention no clean flux came out.

Chris: 20:12

yeah. Baby, my friend. Everybody's friend,

Mike: 20:16

so for your listeners who may not be aware, you know, flux is a, is a. Chemical we apply to, to the board during the soldering process. It helps the soldering process. Basically it does a bunch of things and then, but it leaves kind of a gooey sticky mess. And, and then we remove that gooey

Chris: 20:31

not my No clean, not my

Mike: 20:33

your no clean, right? Wow. Right. So one of the problems we had, oh, well, not really a problem. One of the factors that we really never considered when we cleaned the board, we called it a de fluxing process, right? Cuz we're removing flux.

Chris: 20:50

I didn't,

Mike: 20:51

And then when someone said, Hey, here's a no clean flux, it doesn't leave a residue, it's totally harmless. You don't need to clean it. So

Chris: 21:01

48. By the way, if, if listeners are curious, the entire episode was dedicated to flux,

Mike: 21:06

There you go. So the, if someone says the flux doesn't have to be removed, which process are you gonna get rid of? The de fluxing process. Right. So from the eighties to the nineties, no clean. Took over.

Chris: 21:22

Okay.

Mike: 21:22

Everyone started using no clean. You're using no clean. There's nothing wrong with using no clean. Everyone started using no clean and stopped cleaning because that was, that's the point, right? And the world was a pretty happy place. Our world was a pretty happy place. We still sold equipment because the military never bought onto no clean. The medical world generally didn't buy onto no clean, super high rail stuff that can't fail or people die, didn't buy onto no clean. But they hold consumer industry, which is 80% of the, of, of our work, right. As an EMS provider you know, they, they embrace no clean quite successfully. But several years ago, we started seeing an increase in failures on boards. I was like, what's going on? These boards are failing

Chris: 22:08

Now, I'm curious about this, Mike. So like who is following? These trends? Is it ipc? Who's getting visibility into this and saying, Hey, we need to address this. You don't have to name names, but I'm just wondering how these things bubble up. You know what I mean? So, how does the IPC go and, and, and the people who are on the, on the not the board. What's, what's, when, when you, when you help edit a document for ipc, what do you call a committee?

Mike: 22:32

I P C committees. Yeah.

Chris: 22:34

So, you know, how do these things bubble up? Is it during the meetings at Apex and stuff like that? Like, who starts to raise their hand and says, Hey, I'm from Boeing and we've had an increase of failures and I'm from NASA and, and we've had an increase from failures and it, and it started happening in 2016, you know, kind of a

Mike: 22:50

Yeah. I, I've been on standards committees and that's a fun, that's a fun ride. They're slow. They're slow, they're molasses and winter, but they, but they're effective. Right. But they're, every country heard from, so, you know, representatives from aerospace and commercial and suppliers. Manufacturers and all these different entities, you know, show up to these meetings. And I, I believe you know, I, I can imagine a scenario where someone from aerospace goes, Hey, we got this thing going on, you know, and someone goes, yeah, us too. And Oh yeah, so do we. And it just kind of became an, a known thing and

Chris: 23:24

just, it could even just be literally like a dinner between a bunch of, you know, like, Hey, you're having that, yeah, I'm having that. And then just all of a sudden it's just, it's bubbling up. And then somebody, somebody says, Hey, proposal for the next I P C meeting, let, let's, you know, let's talk about this. I want, I want to see if more people are having this and that, and that's kind of how these things bubble.

Mike: 23:45

Right. And there were already people in those groups that were never proponents of a one number fits all. And you know, these people are like,

Chris: 23:54

They're the worst

Mike: 23:55

as I said, as I said, it's coming true as I predicted, right? So,

Chris: 24:01

when I predicted in 2015

Mike: 24:03

I told you, I told you so. So there was somebody I told you so I was there and they were right. And the folks like us that had been saying that for a long time. And so anyway,

Chris: 24:13

I'm the ostrich with my head in the Sandman.

Mike: 24:15

hey, you know, everyone was happy with their head in the sand. It was nice and cozy, it was warm and we didn't see any danger and we didn't really have any problems. The system worked. We didn't make a mistake. The system worked until it didn't. That's typically what happens in technology. It works until it doesn't. It's great until it's not. So it turns out we set our own trap. We are industry, particularly the designers that are a lot of your listeners, this is all their fault because here we

Chris: 24:46

Well, it's been nice having you on the show, Mike, and this has been an excellent

Mike: 24:49

Yeah. The, the second and last time. And I'll send you the RMA number for our equipment, right.

Chris: 24:54

Yeah,

Mike: 24:54

send it back. No, I'll, I'll tell you why, because one of the marvels of our industry totally blows me away is miniaturization. I look at components that if I drop the reel, somehow, if I drop loose components on the floor, I wouldn't even, I wouldn't even try and pick them up. I can't see them. Right. I'll just get the dust buster out and, you know,

Chris: 25:15

could literally, they could be stuck to your hands on your way home. You won't even know it.

Mike: 25:20

Right? Right. And they're in the trends of your shoe and, and it's just so that has allowed wonderful things. You know, I'm able to have a super computer in my back pocket, you know, in the form of an iPhone. I'm able to have awesome technology, a watch like a Dick Tracy watch I grew up with, you know, the, the cartoon, you know, the, the comic strip Dick Tracy. And he had a, he had a watch that had a telephone in it, and I have that right. And, and, but that's due to what your designers do. The, the, the miracles, the, the miniaturization. So we're able to, to miniaturize components and we're able to put more components in a much smaller footprint on, on a much smaller assembly.

Chris: 25:58

you grew up with Dick Tracy. I grew up with Inspector Gadget and he had a super cool hat. I want the ne, you know, everybody's focused on this VR stuff, making new, cool VR things. Forget that. I want the Inspector Gadget hat. You got your Dick Tracy watch. I want my Inspector Gadget hat

Mike: 26:14

well, thank God that we, we didn't end up with Maxwell Smart and get smart because he had a, he had a a sh a phone and a

Chris: 26:20

phone,

Mike: 26:21

and he would, he would take off a shoe, turn it souls up, there was a dial in it and hold it up to Do you wanna hold the souls of your shoe up to your face and

Chris: 26:31

I have dogs, Mike. No way.

Mike: 26:33

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, Thank God for your listeners because they've created a world where we didn't need that. So it turns out that as we put things much, much, much closer together, the tolerance for residue drops and I, and I liken it, to take that Grand Central station, this giant bus busting train station,

Chris: 26:57

beautiful. It's so, it's so, it's, it's, it's Take your breath away. Beautiful. If a listener's never visited there and you give the opportunity to go to New York City, it

Mike: 27:06

Yeah. It's, it's, it's amazing. And if that giant great Hall had 10 people in it all spread out, one of 'em had a hor horrible disease. Well that's just one of 'em had like the coronavirus or

Chris: 27:22

Yeah,

Mike: 27:22

Right. The other nine will probably be fine.

Chris: 27:25

probably.

Mike: 27:27

Probably be fine. Cuz there's, there was a social distance distancing on him. Look at that, of that scenario. On a Friday afternoon, any Friday afternoon or any afternoon for that matter, it is shoulder to shoulder people. You put one sick person in there and you're gonna have hundreds of sick people because the tolerance for residue, the tolerance for a virus is much lower when everything is close together. The same exact reasoning for circuit assemblies, you put things much closer together, stick residue between them, and we have a problem. Now, where's this residue coming from? Because

Chris: 28:04

let me, let me, let me slow you down for a second here so we know where the residues coming from. That's the flux, right? But what I don't

Mike: 28:11

No,

Chris: 28:12

no.

Mike: 28:13

no,

Chris: 28:13

Oh, good. Good, good, good. Fill me in, Mike.

Mike: 28:16

a great setup. Yeah. I mean, a little bit of it is the flux, but not enough to cause a problem. It turned out the deal we made with no clean. This is just a, you know, this is a metaphor, but we kind of had a contract with no clean When no clean came, no clean flux came on the scene. The, the deal was the residue would be invisible. Turns out there is residue, but it's invisible. And the invisible residue would be benign.

Chris: 28:41

Yes.

Mike: 28:42

Okay? So we can't see it and it's not bad deal, right? We're never gonna clean

Chris: 28:47

deal. Yeah.

Mike: 28:49

But the problem, remember I started saying, we called it a de fluxing process.

Chris: 28:53

Yes.

Mike: 28:54

It, it was never a de influxing process. It was a cleaning process, flux being one of the things that we're removing. But because our mentality is we buy de fluxing equipment, we fill it with de fluxing chemical, and we run a de influxing process. When the flux guy says, my stuff is clean, it never has to be cleaned, we don't de anything. Right? We

Chris: 29:16

he's right. His flux is clean.

Mike: 29:18

his Exactly. But. But there are, if you bought bear circuit boards from any fabricator, China and the us, Mexico, wherever, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, whatever, whatever makes them, if you were to subject them to cleanliness, testing, don't even touch them with your hands. Just carefully wearing gloves. Take 'em outta the package. The moment you get them, put 'em in a tester. They're never at zero.

Chris: 29:46

sure.

Mike: 29:46

on there. Not enough to be problematic.

Chris: 29:49

Are they below 10? I just wanna know if

Mike: 29:50

Well below 10, but they're not at zero. So you're not starting at zero. There's, there's a measurable amount of contamination on there, not harmful. The moment you touch a board, the moment it goes through your assembly process, it's going to getting dirtier. There's board fab contamination, as I talked about. There's component fab contamination. There's process contamination, and then we throw flux on top.

Chris: 30:16

yep.

Mike: 30:17

and it

Chris: 30:18

it all

Mike: 30:18

out it's not any one of those. It's all of those. It's the totality of all the residue, which has always been there, always been there. But before, no clean. We removed it all. And after no clean, we stopped removing it all. But it wasn't a problem for 20 years.

Chris: 30:39

Mm-hmm.

Mike: 30:41

It's a problem today. If you don't want it to be a problem, go back to your designs 20 years ago,

Chris: 30:46

So, so help me, help me to understand then. So you've got see, I mean, Mike, it's like you've been on the show before. We always just tell people and make it bigger. All these problems go away. Just make it bigger. No. So,

Mike: 31:01

That's very true. I, I tell people, if you want, you have two choices.

Chris: 31:05

higher reliability,

Mike: 31:06

raise the bridge or lower the river, or, you know, whatever. You have two choices and If you have to either reduce the residues or increase the tolerance for residues,

Chris: 31:17

So I guess my, my question is then when you are cleaning, not de fluxing, as we've learned, right? And, and you're, and you're getting all that detritus off the board what is, what does Dave call it? Swath, getting the swath off the board, debris,

Mike: 31:33

oh no, he calls it, no, he calls it something. I forget. It'll, it'll come back to me.

Chris: 31:36

Yeah. So, you get what is i I is that having an electrical impact that, that is causing failures, you know what I mean? So like, is it creating a, a, a, some kind of a circuit that should not be there?

Mike: 31:51

That's exactly what's happening. It's an electrochemical migration issue. So, you know, back when I was in high school, in science class or in metal shop, and I forget which class auto shop I took anything that ended in shop, I took right

Chris: 32:05

Yeah. I wish we had an auto shop,

Mike: 32:06

Oh, that was great. But I remember we, we used to chrome plate stuff, like we wanted to chrome, you know, fix our bumper, chrome plate or bumper, chrome plate, anything metal, you know, and the process of chrome plating is, you put the chrome, you know, the, the source metal in one area and the target in the other, and you put it in this conductive solution and run a current through it. And the, and the metal dissolves off of the source and, and transports through the solution and, and applies itself to the other polarity. You know, the other, the other metal, right? So you could gold plate, you could all these different copper plate, you could do all these plannings. Well, on a circuit board, the whole assembly has turned into a plating operation, because what do you need to, to plate? What do you need? Electrochemical migration. You need,

Chris: 32:58

Chemicals and electro.

Mike: 32:59

you need, yeah, you need moisture, you need a conductive solution and you need an electrical bias. Those are the three pillars. So dendrites can, well, what, what happens with with electrochemical migration is, is there's three phenomenon from electrochemical migration. One of 'em is dendritic growth. What's a dendri? Dendrite is a metal crystal looks like a tree branch. In fact, Dendri comes from the Greek word dendron, which means tree . So, or dendrites, which means tree-like,

Chris: 33:28

They're actually really cool looking

Mike: 33:30

whoever was naming names that day didn't have to go far off the ranch, right? They, they were like, yeah, it looks like a tree. Call it a tree. Let's go home.

Chris: 33:36

Dendrites in like a Google image search, they're, they're actually very cool looking like the, you know, the things that grow on circuit

Mike: 33:42

Right. Well, here's the problem. Dendrites are, are made of metal. They, they basically rob metal from part of your board and try and deliver it to another part of the board. It's a very generous operation. I wanna give metal. I wanna, it's like a socialism that just wants to spread the metal wealth everywhere,

Chris: 33:57

Making it rain.

Mike: 33:58

Making it rain. But the problem is we don't want electrical current to flow directly between two polarities, between a cathode and an anode, right? Because that, we call that a short right? And it, it shorts, it could catch fire, it could create smoke. It's very dramatic. And it turns out that because we're not cleaning the boards and because we've moved the, the polarities, the positive and negatives, very, very, very close. It doesn't take much residue. The bridge, the, the gap that we need to build this metal bridge is very small.

Chris: 34:41

Okay.

Mike: 34:42

So before we could be growing a dendri, but it never reached the other side because it was just too far. It was a bridge to nowhere. It was

Chris: 34:51

so if I understand correctly, the, the working theory on these dendrites, and, and maybe it's not a theory at this point, maybe it's proven is that it's the, it's the flux and the cruft that is in the flux that is allowing these dendrites to grow.

Mike: 35:07

Schmitz, I think he

Chris: 35:08

Schmitz. There we

Mike: 35:09

there. Yeah. You were almost there. Schmitz. Yeah. Doug Pauls. Doug Pauls For your listeners. Doug Pauls is the he is a technical fellow at Collins Aerospace, formerly Rockwell, and he was the chair of the I P C committee that changed the cleanliness standard.

Chris: 35:25

Okay. And Collins is they're a supplier to like Lockheed and NASA and,

Mike: 35:32

a major aerospace supplier. They make most of the cockpit instruments and many other things to the civil aviation and, and military aviation world. Yeah. They're, they're a big player. Right? Their stuff

Chris: 35:43

if you've, if you've flown on a 7 37, it's very likely that some of their assemblies are in that plane.

Mike: 35:49

Sure. Almost guaranteed. Yeah. Same with Airbus or whatever. So the, the, the industry started noticing we're getting more and more electrochemical migration related failures. One of 'em is dendritic growth. That's pretty easy to tell. Because the p the part blows up, right. it, and it leaves, it leaves a, a scar. The more insidious result of electric chemical migration is called parasitic electrical leakage. And what is that? That is a temporary. which makes it insidious. So, all of a sudden you don't quite get a dead short, but you get, you do get a little conductivity between two points on the board, which is not supposed to be conductive, right. You're, you're losing the resistance. The resistance is dropping, the conductivity is rising, not enough to create a dead short or drama or smoke and fire, but enough to cause the board to not function properly. Maybe it's a board that requires, maybe it's a product that has to be calibrated and it won't calibrate. Or we had an example of an audio company that made stage quality professional amplifiers for the pro music industry, and they, they said the tonal quality of their, of their, of, of the sound coming outta the speakers was off and turned out to be a cleaning issue. Not enough to cause a short, but enough to. Cause it to act a little weird, it just wouldn't, wasn't running properly. That's one problem. And when I say it's a temporary problem, it only occurs, keep in mind three pillars of ecm. Electric chemical congregation, moisture, conductive, residues bias, moisture. If they took this, this concert equipment out and they put it on a stage and Alabama for a summer concert series, humidity, moisture, the thing, acted squirrely, put it back in the studio and test it, it worked fine because the studio is climate control. So that, that's the insidious part of it. And then there are other things

Chris: 37:45

or, or they go higher voltage. Right.

Mike: 37:47

go higher voltage. And voltage plays a role too. Voltage is one of the contributing factors. You know, the amount of bias, the lower the bias, the lower the, the opportunity for ecm. The higher the bias, the greater the opportunity. Well, what part of our industry is growing faster than pretty much any other EVs?

Chris: 38:07

yeah.

Mike: 38:08

We're putting a thousand volts through some of these boards we're building. Now, electronics is notoriously known for, you know, relatively low voltage, five volts, you know, 2.4 volts, 10 volts, 24 volts, six volts, whatever, thousand volts. You know, you can't even have a dirty thought in your head when you're assembling those boards because you're running so much current through it that

Chris: 38:31

a good boy there, Mike. I, this is not happening in my

Mike: 38:35

keep your head in a, in a high place, right? So, so the, the reality is the industry realized this number is not working anymore because there are people who are meeting the number less than 10, and they're, they're getting all this ECM stuff, they're getting residue related failures.

Chris: 38:54

No kidding.

Mike: 38:54

So we need to rethink that. And the group got together, Doug Pauls chaired the committee. They, he called his committee, the Rhino team. So I, because you kind of have to be a rhino, you have to be a bull in a China shop

Chris: 39:08

Yeah.

Mike: 39:09

you're taking away, it's like taking candy from a baby. Not, not in terms of the ease of taking candy from a baby, but the repercussions of taking candy from a baby. The babies will scream and cry.

Chris: 39:21

Yeah.

Mike: 39:21

Our industry screamed and cried and they're screaming and crying today because we took away their number. We took away the just gimme a number and, and they replaced it with something I think was rather brave and and brilliant. They said, here's, here's Chris asking a question. Okay, I p c I have this board.

Chris: 39:46

Yeah.

Mike: 39:47

How clean does this board need to be? I P C then turned around and said, okay, Chris and Melissa, your board needs to be clean enough to work in the intended climactic operating environment. Without failure.

Chris: 40:04

Okay,

Mike: 40:04

And then you go, well, how clean is that?

Chris: 40:07

Yeah.

Mike: 40:08

I get that. How clean is that? And I P C turned around and said, it depends.

Chris: 40:13

Ah,

Mike: 40:14

truly what happened. To paraphrase. And then Chris and Melissa says, it depends on what he, he said, well, it, it depends on how much residue your board can tolerate. And Melissa and Chris said, well, how much can my board tolerate? And I P C said, you tell me and base the answer on objective evidence,

Chris: 40:32

All right. So here, now we're, now we're getting to the newest standard, right? So my, my understanding is, you know, contract manufacturers like Worthington Assembly, we are going to say, we are building your products to I P C class two, following J standard 0 0 1. Th this is something that, you know, when customers come to us and they say, Hey, how can you, you know, how can I know that you're gonna deliver a quality product to me? I can say, We have people trained here on J standard, and I p c, yada, yada, yada. Here's three customers that can all confirm that we meet those standards, right? And then the two of us have an agreement and I'll, I'm gonna start building their boards. For most things, let's say a solder joint, it's, it's quite objective because you can say you know, the whole fill needs to be 75% or whatever, and, you know, on a ground plane. And yet, you know, but you, you can, you can measure these things, right? I can, I can, somebody can, a customer can come back to me and say, Hey this failed, right? And I have a defensible ar obviously I wanna support them anyway. I can, let's, let's be honest. But I, I can have a defensible argument where I can go to them and be like, you know, I'm so sorry that it failed. However, we did meet the agreed requirements. We met I P C class two here.. Here, here is the evidence. I can measure this solder joint. It, it, you know, I, I understand that it failed, but look, here's a pair of cas. We can, you know, you're not actually using cas, I get it, but we can measure it. When you w with what you just said, if I am entering into an agreement with a customer that I'm gonna build their product for them, my next question has to be, well, what does it do? What environment's it gonna be in? And then I have to determine whether or not I, I trust that I can build it reliably enough. Like I'm so confused by it. I, I don't even like, it's gonna take me twice as long, just a quote, cuz I gotta do it. I gotta hire engineers to do an evaluation of it.

Mike: 42:43

Right. Well, one of the challenges we have, you, you talked about class two and. Your listeners there's basically three classes. We call them classes, class one, class two, class three, and all the class designates is what's the expected level of reliability. So, military, aerospace, medical, they're all class three. That's the high reliability camp, fail people die. Class two is stuff that maybe like office equipment and, and, and communications equipment that, no, no one's really gonna die, but, but they are expected to to work. Right. Class one is commercial stuff, kind of consumable, throwaway kind of stuff. Electronic flea callers for dogs and cats. That's class one. The problem we're having, and I just had, you know, you and I both do podcasts, right? So, I had a guest on my show, it was Phil Zoro and Jim Hall a, a while ago. They're consultants within our space and you know, they, they talked

Chris: 43:38

are they? They call themselves the soldering brothers.

Mike: 43:40

the soldering brothers. Yeah. Yeah. They, they, they're. So-called, I say so-called podcast. It's not technically a podcast, but they, it's kind of like a podcast. They, they model their, their show after the old NPR show called Car Talk, where two gruffy mechanics from Boston, you know, give what they call worthless advice to people who are calling in. They, they model after that. But their point was that we kind of need a class 1.5 or 2.5 because if you're building crappy, little cheap, crappy little electronics things that, you know, for kids toys or, or for electronic flea callers, I'd like to use that example. Apple air tags, you know, whatever. It's not class three, arguably, in fact, probably not even class two traditionally, but because it's going out, because it's being built with a highly miniaturized assembly with miniaturized components because the residue tolerance is much lower because it's going out. As Internet of Things allows us to build things and connect devices which have historically not had electronics in them, like wearables and, you know, things like that. We're taking them out with us into harsh environments. All of a sudden, class one products built to Class one standards are failing. Now no one's dying, but even if you're not building a super high reliability product, it still is expected to work,

Chris: 45:03

Yeah. Financially,

Mike: 45:05

Financially. Otherwise, you have RMAs and you've, you've got a reputational issue and all that stuff. So a lot of people are starting to re-look at that class thing, not in terms of changing the class standards, but saying we have a Class one product, but we kind of need to build it to class three standards, not for the reasons that Boeing builds to Class three, but because it's just not surviving in, in a, in a class one. World. Right? It's or in, in a highly miniaturized world. So that's, that's the dilemma. So the, the new standard as I, as I alluded to, I find it, it makes a lot of sense. It puts the burden. People look at it two ways. They think, well, it's a burden cuz I have to come up with the objective evidence. True. But it's also liberating because now you can have as much contamination as your board can handle. You're not, you're

Chris: 46:00

No, no. I get.

Mike: 46:01

standard.

Chris: 46:02

I get it. It is a brilliant, it is a, it is a brilliant solution. I, I do agree. I do agree. It's sort of like, that clause at the beginning of, of I P c a six 10 where it says all of these standards are absolutely true unless you agree they're not

Mike: 46:19

As between, as agreed between manufacturer and user,

Chris: 46:22

That's right. Right.

Mike: 46:24

every declarative statement thou shalt do this, ends with, unless you don't want to and, and you can get your customer to agree

Chris: 46:33

Yeah. So, so like, for example, like I p C allows for bill boarded resistors and capacitors where, where rather than sitting flat, like they should, they're sitting on their side. And for certain classes though, it's acceptable to ship that, but I may have a customer who goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. But I want 'em to be.. And so we have an agreement and we say, okay, we're following all these standards except for this. It is, it is a brilliant, it is a brilliant way of, of solving for disagreements and these sorts of things. And I, and I love this idea, this concept that you know, at the end of the day, if I am shipping assemblies without running them through a cleaning process, just, you know, running them through my no cleaning process and my customers are having them operate in the field for 10 years, well, I've, we, we have met the objective, right? like, like I have cleaned them to an acceptable standard because they didn't have to be cleaned and they were still had a very long-term reliability because they just sat in a doctor's office and they never fluctuated anywhere between 68 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit year round. Right.

Mike: 47:39

That actually, Chris is your golden ticket. It's like Willy Wonka. You know, that, you know, they were in search of the golden ticket. That is your golden ticket, because there's all sorts of, there's a very specific requirement, which I'll get into momentarily on how to, how to obtain objective evidence. It's a very, it's a protocol. You gotta do this, then you gotta do this, however, If you've been building boards a certain way for any length of time and you can prove you've never had a residue related failure or not, not never, but that is not an issue, right? And you haven't made any changes to your process. That alone is objective evidence

Chris: 48:23

Yeah.

Mike: 48:24

that can stand alone as objective evidence. You don't need to go through the protocol. Now, the flying, the ointment is, I P C says there's two types of changes. Level one changes, which they consider major changes to your process. And level two changes, which are considered minor changes.

Chris: 48:41

Very.

Mike: 48:42

If you, and it lists a whole bunch of, you know, it lists all the things that are considered level one and level two

Chris: 48:48

and they get into specifics. Like changing the alloy would be a

Mike: 48:51

Change the alloy, change the metalization, change the solder max mask, check this. Change the location within your building that you build the product. So if you have three SMT lines and you move it from line one to line two, that's a change. Okay? Because y'all know every line is different, right? Even though they could be all the same brand of equipment, you could do three clone lines, but they're all, they all have personalities, right? So anyway, that's enough to trigger a change. Once your process is triggered by a level one or level two change, then you have to follow the protocol. Your objective evidence that we've never had a problem goes in the garbage can because it's not relevant, because you've made a change since then.

Chris: 49:31

So if you wanna be. A modern, flexible manufacturer that is capable of buying new equipment and making changes in introducing new processes, because you wanna be more efficient. Effectively, all of your products now have to, you know, like, let's be honest, like we, you know, we're buying a stencil cleaner. We just talked about it. That means now we are changing the way we clean our stencils. That's a, that's a change, right? So then I have effectively changed my process.

Mike: 50:00

wouldn't change. No, that wouldn't be a, that

Chris: 50:02

Oh, all right. Well, all

Mike: 50:03

you're okay. There,

Chris: 50:04

yeah.

Mike: 50:04

you dodge that bullet.

Chris: 50:07

I mean, but there's gotta be, there's something, there's

Mike: 50:09

up your cleaner, your board cleaner and, and establish your objective evidence with the board cleaner in the west wing of your building and you moved it to the east wing of the building, that would be a change. If you started off with brand A chemical and you switch to brand B chemical, that would be a change. If you set up your objective evidence with a 10 minute wash time and then you realize that was too long, you can actually do it in five. That's a change.

Chris: 50:30

Yep. Of course.

Mike: 50:31

so let's talk about what the what the protocol is for. How, how do you, how do you generate objective evidence? So, The whole idea of the standard is to make sure that your board's not gonna fail regardless of how much contamination is on there. No one really cares how much contamination is on there, as long as that contamination isn't problematic. Great. So that relieves you of a, of a arbitrary burden. How do we establish that the contamination is not problematic? While we need a crystal ball, we need to look into the future. How do we look into the future? We artificially age your board.

Chris: 51:05

Yep.

Mike: 51:06

We make the board 10 years old rather than 10 minutes old. How do we do that? We subject it to heat and humidity

Chris: 51:17

Mm-hmm.

Mike: 51:17

under an electrical bias, meaning it has to be plugged in. And that is an age acceler., right? It, it, it's like the old lady from Florida that spends her whole time on the beach. She's 37 years old, but she looks 90. Right. She's all shriveled up and brown and, you know, it's, it's the same, same process. The problem is we can't do that on your assemblies because the way we test to see if the board is working or failing, we have to test the electrical resistance across a whole bunch of points on your board.

Chris: 51:54

There might be 200 nets on this thing.

Mike: 51:56

Yes. So imagine, you know, imagine this little metal comb pattern that goes underneath components and we're measuring the electrical resistance between each trace. Right? So we need special boards for that. So they're called test coupons.

Chris: 52:10

Mm.

Mike: 52:11

And there's a number of different designs. There's the B 52, there's the umpire board, umpire two. There's all these different trade names for these boards. But basically you get a test coupon and you populate it with the types of components that you would be populating your production board. You try and mimic your production design on the test coupon, so you you populate it with similar components, you solder it with the same exact soldering materials you plan on using. You run it through your reflow oven, your soldering oven with the same temperature profile that you would on your production assembly. So you try and clone this test board and once that test coupon has been reflowed with I nearly identical parameters as you plan on your production board. The, the test board has these little edge connectors on it so that the test board then plugs into this connector, which is connected to a machine which monitors the electrical resistance between a hundred different points on that board or however many. And then that, that test board connected to this device is put into an environmental chamber, heat and humidity for 168 hours. That's, that's a week, right? 168 hours. And during that 168 hours, there's all these, the, the machine is graphing the electrical resistance and the electrical resistance needs to be above and remain above every channel. Every point of measurement has to be above in terms of resistance, one times 10 to the eighth., so has to be a high number of high value of resistance for 168 hours. and some of it is a nail biter because you're watching the graph slowly make its way down and then it might pop back up again because maybe there was a little bit of a dendri forming and then it, it, it blew up and, and it didn't quite make it to the other end and it was a temporary issue. But that's fine, as long as no channel drops below that one times 10 of the eighth. Then after 168 hours, if your board hasn't failed, that board is deemed to be clean enough. Okay? That's your objective evidence. Now you can't, the problem is you can't spot check your assemblies

Chris: 54:44

That's

Mike: 54:45

to see if they're as clean as your test coupon because you can't, s i r you can't subject it to surface insulation resistance testing cuz it's not a test coupon. It doesn't have all the, the, the design elements to it. So how do we know your process is in order? that's the second leg of the standard back to rose testing. rose testing kind of got demoted rose testing before the new standard was pass fail

Chris: 55:12

Right. And just, if you don't mind, bring, bring us up to speed with how, how one performs a rose test. You don't have to get into major detail,

Mike: 55:20

So what a rose tester is in simple terms is you have a we call it a test cell, but you have a container of very, very sensitive solution. It's, it's comprised of 75% isopropyl alcohol and 25% deionized water.

Chris: 55:39

Mm-hmm.

Mike: 55:40

And then we run that solution through ion exchange media and that removed all the ions.

Chris: 55:49

Okay.

Mike: 55:49

And ions are what? Conductor? Electricity. Right? So we remove the ions, we make that, we deionized that solution and we bring it to an ultra-high level of quality. 150 million OMS of resistance. If you're in the bathtub and your partner wants to kill you and throw in a toaster or a hair dryer, hope you're in this 150 million home solution, cuz you, you might fill a tingle but you won't die. So it's, it's really, really sensitive. And, and then we take a board, which you presume is clean, and we submerse the board into that ultra-sensitive, ultra-clean solution. And any contaminants that are on your board, any residues that are on your board will be dissolved out into the solution and caused the solutions resistivity to drop. Because as, as con contaminants conduct electricity, we put the board in solution, which wasn't conducting an electricity. And we can basically measure. It's not technically true, but we kinda measure the difference between how clean was the solution before, how clean is it Now the only difference is stuff that came off your board and then we quantify the volume that came off your board and we divide that volume by the area of your board so we can make it relative to your board. So your board has, and, and then we express that in micrograms of sodium salt, micrograms of sodium per square range. And people get confused by that because they go, is there salt on my boards? Like, no. What we're calculating is since salt is conductive salt, when mixed with solution can conduct electricity, we calculate, let's assume the test solution was 150 million OMS of resistance and we put your board in and at the end of the test it was 1 million o

Chris: 57:36

Yep,

Mike: 57:36

so it dropped 149 million oms. That's how much contamination was on your board. We simply calculate. How much salt would we have to add to 150 million o solution to cause it to drop to 1 million? O We're not adding salt, but that's theoretically how much salt would we

Chris: 57:54

equivalence. Yeah.

Mike: 57:55

So, so the results are always measured in x micrograms of sodium equivalent per square inch or centimeter squared. So if it's, if it's,

Chris: 58:05

That's catchy, Mike. I mean, that's the kind

Mike: 58:06

it's a sexy thing. I'll tell you, you, you drop those terms at a cocktail party, man, you're, you're a popular person all night

Chris: 58:13

The next time at the Yell Club,

Mike: 58:14

Yeah, they, you know, all the women Just say, tell me more, tell me more. Talk about sodium equivalent. Mike, please say it slower. Yeah, it's, it's it's, it's, yeah, it's definitely a non-sexy topic, but that's, that was a good question. How, how do they work? So the, if you're working in the imperial world, we are like last country standing. The number is 10 micrograms of sodium equivalent per square inch. If you're working in the rest of the world, it's 1.56 micrograms of sodium equivalent per centimeter squared. That's the same value, the same number. So now you have to do rose testing to make sure your processes in order. So you take one board per batch, one board per hour, one board per day. I like more testing than less testing.. Well, let me go back. Once you do your test coupon through the surface insulation resistance test and you pass, then you take that same board that just passed and you subject it to a rose test,

Chris: 59:09

Yep.

Mike: 59:10

and that establishes what we call the upper control limit ucl.

Chris: 59:15

it's your, it's your, your baseline, if you will. It's something to at least measure it from.

Mike: 59:19

Yeah. The IPC recommends you apply, you know, a standard deviation in a mean three sigma, whatever. So you might take that number and bump it up a tiny bit. But let's assume your number was six micrograms of sodium per square inch the s i r board, the chess coupon score to six, that would then be the upper control limit. Basically, now you take your production boards, Randomly or periodically, or some people test all of them. You grab one from production and you after cleaning or whatever, and you test it as long as the results are six or under. In this example, ship, ship, ship, ship, ship. But I p C makes a point. They said, this is not the number that differentiates clean from dirty. This is a number that tells you your process is in order. That's all. It's a process indicator or process monitor, depending if you're class three or two. It's one of the two. But either way you, you randomly check it. If the standard says you exceed six in this example, do you stop the presses? No. You test another one right away. You test two. You gotta get two fails or, or two, two high numbers above the upper control limit. If the next one passes, if you one fail one. One pass then you do an investigation on the board that failed. And generally it's, it's an anomaly. Generally, it's someone stuck their hands in the tester and, you know, they did something wrong.

Chris: 1:00:47

they just finished a bag of Cheetos and,

Mike: 1:00:49

yeah, they ate, they ate, yeah. Cheeto dust over the, over the, over the board. And you still have to do an investigation on the one fail board, but you can keep your pro process line running. However, if two in a row fail, that requires that you stop the presses, hit the button, stop production line down, and segregate, quarantine all the boards from the last pass to this first fail,

Chris: 1:01:10

Yep.

Mike: 1:01:12

do an investigation. Actually inspect them. Maybe do local chemical characterization tests, local extraction, whatever method you you're gonna use to determine what went wrong, fix what went wrong, and then re-clean those boards and, and then subject those to random testing. And then everything's back again. So, There is a lot of work theoretically, because when you have a, a new product, you have to, you have to create a test coupon that, that mimics the product and, and subject it to s i r And most people overwhelmingly, most people will not do that in-house. They'll send that out to a lab.

Chris: 1:01:49

I was gonna say, yeah, and one of the complications with businesses, you know, designed for What we do, new product introduction is everything's totally unique, right? Like every board we get is like, this one's got oh 1 0 0 5 s and that one's got 8 0 5 s and, and how am I, you know, so I guess there's a range of these test coupons and I can, I can just test it, each one of them and say, you know, I'm still controlling for that.

Mike: 1:02:18

Yeah. And, and in your world, Chris, you know, you have a challenge. Your guys' specialty, your niche. Well, , we all do. Yeah. But one of your unique, more unique challenges is you specialize in lower volume, quick turn kind of stuff. Am I right?

Chris: 1:02:34

yeah, of course. Yeah.

Mike: 1:02:35

And that presents a challenge and it's like, do you have to do this for every three boards you make, you know, you got a contract to produce three boards, do you have, and they want it to class two, class three. Do you have to go, you know, wait, a wait a week just to get the results of one s i r I would argue that if the soldering materials are the same as a board, you've already subjected to that test and the types of components are similar. I don't think you really need to come up with unique s i r tests that are identical to other tests you've already done. You can probably generate objective evidence saying we did a board just like this with, you know, these component types with this sovereign material, with this kind of profile. and we've already established the objective evidence that would probably hold up

Chris: 1:03:23

Now if

Mike: 1:03:24

test your, your production boards.

Chris: 1:03:26

so I take my, my dirty filthy boards that are fresh off the assembly line cuz I don't run 'em through an aqueous tech board washer. And I send them out for, for testing and I get whatever result, you know, it was able to achieve, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I throw that same thing in a rose tester. It's gonna be., filthy, right? I mean, the thing is , it's got flux all over it. I haven't cleaned it. And are those, is it even possible for those things to pass those tests?

Mike: 1:03:55

Is it no clean flux or is it a like an RMA or a water soluble flu?

Chris: 1:03:58

Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's specifically marketed, designed and sold as an no clean

Mike: 1:04:02

Yeah. Then you don't want to ever rose test. No, no clean. That's, that is a huge misconception. There's two reasons you never want to roast test a no clean one is no clean works by taking the bad actors, the activators that are on the flux, flux has to do its job, right? And, and to do its job, it has to have nasty stuff in it. And the technology behind the idea of just don't clean it, is it takes a lot of those activators in, it encapsulates it in this resin rosin layer. It basically slacks over it, you know, and, and that insulates

Chris: 1:04:37

amber that ed the the dinosaur

Mike: 1:04:40

Exactly. Yeah. The insect that got caught in the amber, you know, it, it, it protects it from converting into an ECM issue. The problem is, if the tester manages to dissolve that,

Chris: 1:04:51

It releases it all.

Mike: 1:04:52

it's gonna measure things that may not have been problematic. Right? That's one problem. The bigger problem is a practical problem. No clean flux reacts with. IPA by turning white

Chris: 1:05:06

Yes,

Mike: 1:05:07

So you may test your board, but now your board is white

Chris: 1:05:11

yes,

Mike: 1:05:12

and the only way to remove that white is to reheat it, run it back through the oven. Otherwise that white stays on, you can't wash it off.

Chris: 1:05:19

Yeah,

Mike: 1:05:19

And so it kind of ruins, it becomes a destructive test. Cause no one wants a this white crusty board, right?

Chris: 1:05:25

one doodle that can't be undid.

Mike: 1:05:26

That's right, exactly. So, so for no clean , that's a different animal. If you're running no clean, you can still do the, your s i r testing, but your, your process monitoring will have to be done differently.

Chris: 1:05:40

Yeah. Yeah, I was gonna say that that would have to be done

Mike: 1:05:43

And that's gonna be as agreed between manufacturer and user. Cuz you're gonna have to get creative.

Chris: 1:05:49

Yeah. So then a company like us, we would have to market this as hey, we've, we've run these particular test coupons with this particular lab and we've achieved these particular results. Don't come to us if you want results that are different than this , right? Effectively, or if you say, yeah, I want to come to you. But I'll make it worth your while. Then we can go through the process of having a coupon that matches it, meeting a process, and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Mike: 1:06:18

Right. But your idea of quick turn is, you know, keep in mind you have to, first you have to buy the coupons. You have to assemble and reflow the coupons, and then you have to put it in, in an oven for, for seven days,

Chris: 1:06:28

yep. Yeah. But what I'm saying is like we, you know, we've locked in this process where we've done that. Okay. So I, I, I, I took three different coupons from three different vendors, and here's published on my website. Here's the results. Okay. And if you're comfortable with us producing your product on this assembly line with these results, we're here for you. We can do

Mike: 1:06:50

Yeah, that's what I would do. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And that seems reasonable to me. If you can tell me, look, if if you wanted us to do it just for you, we're gonna do the same thing we've already done, then I'm like, well, save me the money. And

Chris: 1:07:04

Exactly.

Mike: 1:07:04

those tests aren't cheap, those tests, they could be, you know, two or $3,000 to send out for a panel. And so they're not cheap because you're tying up someone's equipment for a week, you know, so it's, and they can be done in house, but most contract assemblers and even OEMs aren't doing that. That's considered an analytical test. It's like iron chromatography, another type of test that's generally not done in house. It's generally laboratory work because it's time consuming, it's a specialty and. How many, how many ovens are you gonna buy? You gonna buy 10 just in case, you know, so you don't have a backup. You know, that's, that, that would be unreasonable. So people use labs.

Chris: 1:07:45

This is this is all very thought provoking and, and, and I see what you're doing here. This is the Trojan Horse. Mike, you're trying to get us to buy a wash. That's what you're trying to do here. I, I, I'm onto you.

Mike: 1:07:55

You know,

Chris: 1:07:55

onto you.

Mike: 1:07:56

the Maslow's theory says, you know, if all you have is a hammer, you see the world as a bed of nails. Right? Well, if you're a cleaner person, all you see is dirt and contamination. Smutz as our friend our friend Doug Pauls would say, schmutz so,

Chris: 1:08:10

I'm gonna call you the Kirby Vacuum salesman of,

Mike: 1:08:12

but wait, there's more. Right?

Chris: 1:08:16

Well, this is great. I love having these conversations. It's all so very fascinating to me that despite, literally at this point, I have, I have been working in this industry for over two decades now. And despite my baby good looks, you know, I, I actually ab I am an old curmudgeon at this point,

Mike: 1:08:32

Yeah, we're getting

Chris: 1:08:33

learning new things from even older curmudgeons or, or maybe not even older, but even more curmudgeonly, that's for

Mike: 1:08:41

Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm happy to pass down the commu. But I should say this, I, I'm, I'm a realist, of course, I'm in the cleaning business, so obviously I benefit when people decide they need to clean. But the reality is not everyone needs to clean.

Chris: 1:08:56

That's right.

Mike: 1:08:56

It's not there yet. More and more people are coming to the cleaning table. I I look at it like, you know, when the sun goes down, the shadows get longer. You know, the, the, the shadows are, are slowly covering, you know, the, the re rest of the world. But,

Chris: 1:09:10

as you mentioned, the

Mike: 1:09:11

you don't need to clean, don't clean.

Chris: 1:09:13

The technology's moving that way. So, you know, we're you used to build a motherboard? An i tx motherboard that was the size of a sheet of paper. Well, now your motherboard is, is the size of an index card or it's the size of a business card or even smaller. And guess what? Cleaning needs go up.

Mike: 1:09:30

Look at these raspberry pies. You know, these, these, these small embedded computers that are, that, that are, you know, size of like three postage stamps. It's, it's scary. Crazy. But

Chris: 1:09:40

are they cleaned? I wonder if they're cleaned cuz they're, cuz they're a consumer product, you know, it's

Mike: 1:09:45

product. They're probably a lot of 'em are working inside, but the, but they could go outside too. I, I don't know. I don't know if they're cleaned or not, but they, that's a good case study because that product can go anywhere. Right. But you know, anytime you introduce a new process, you introduce a reliability risk. Right. So if you're not cleaning your boards right now and you're not having any issues, don't start cleaning unless there's a

Chris: 1:10:11

Can you repeat that more loudly and more emphatically please? No, just

Mike: 1:10:14

If just. Nice thing about a podcast, just hit the back 15 second button and you can hear it again. Right. But, but that's the reality. You know, if, if you don't need to do something, don't do it, and don't do anything you don't need to do because it, it does create an opportunity for someone to make a mistake and then your boards, you know, have a problem. And I can say that confidently because I know it's just a matter of time.

Chris: 1:10:34

We have absolutely no objection to to cleaning circuit boards. It's simply a matter of, of current demand, right? And so our customers just are not demanding it. So we have not made the investment, but more and more customers are, right. We're starting to hear like, Ooh, we had to turn away this opportunity. And we're we're adding those up. So we literally have a list where we say, Hey, this is how much business we lost in

Mike: 1:10:59

sure. At some point it'll be a business decision. Yeah, absolutely.

Chris: 1:11:03

okay, we're gonna make the investment and we're gonna have, we're gonna follow all these things. So I, I kid

Mike: 1:11:08

people, I'll either see you now or I'll see you later. You know, or, or someone like me. It doesn't have to be me, but some, you know, eventually people are back. You know, it's back to the future, you know? We're

Chris: 1:11:16

I'm going to Home Depot. Man. They got, they sell brushes, they sell buckets. I don't see the problem here. I don't need to go to aqueous tech and spend tens of thousands of dollars.

Mike: 1:11:24

a, get a toothbrush and some I ipa. Yeah.

Chris: 1:11:28

That's you joke, you joke, but that's a thing. There's, I guarantee that our shop's doing that. Guarantee it.

Mike: 1:11:34

the thing about cleaning is cleaning is go big or go home. That's, that's one thing I tell people. Look, if you're, if you can't clean, well, don't even try. It's like you can't be half pregnant. Right. It's, it's all or nothing. And cleaning is either completely. Yeah. I'm stunned on that one. Cleaning is completely. all or nothing proposition because if you try and clean and you don't clean well, your board is actually hundreds of times dirtier than it was just leaving it alone. That's one of those cases where if you can't do it, well just leave it alone. Just don't touch it because you can actually make it far worse.

Chris: 1:12:12

Yeah. And that, and that's the scenario we're in today. You know, that's why we just say no. Like we, we just, you know, we're Worthington, you know, we just, no,

Mike: 1:12:19

No, you know, I've learned in business sometimes the word no is way more profitable than the word. Yes. And as a salesperson, and I know you're an engineer, but you're also, you know, you're also plugged

Chris: 1:12:29

heavily involved in sales. Heavily involved in sales.

Mike: 1:12:31

And we hear the word no. Far louder than we hear the word. Yes. We no resonates. No

Chris: 1:12:39

Sorry, I missed that last word you said. What was that? I didn't, yeah,

Mike: 1:12:42

So, you know, when I, I know in my sales team, you know, if we have to say no to somebody, I'm haunted by it. I just keep thinking about it. But then if I sit down and I, and I analyze it, and I.. If we had said yes, how many more orders would we have gotten? Not that many. You know? Then you realize that just do what you do well, and, and eventually you're, you'll have more customers that demand cleaning, and, and then you'll, you'll be the cleaning experts because that's a business move.

Chris: 1:13:11

That's right, that's right. And, and to be, to be perfectly honest, that's, I'm, I'm, I'm honestly surprised it hasn't happened yet. We, you know, we've looked at the numbers and it's just not quite there. But I think, I think it'll

Mike: 1:13:21

Oh,

Chris: 1:13:21

up. And I'll tell you what listeners, if, if you are not currently hiring Worthington or CircuitHub because we can't offer cleaning services let us know. You don't reach out to us. We, because there's, I'm sure there are people who just go on the website, look at capabilities, don't see cleaning, and then move on. Right. You know, so we may be missing opportunities there as well. So, this is, I I had a list of questions. We have thoroughly covered all of them. We are over an hour, 15 minutes here. I think we get onto my favorite part of the show, unless there's anything else you wanted to share with us about cleaning. Mike

Mike: 1:13:52

No, I think I'm, I'm shared out. I think there's, there's, we've covered all the subjects. We've cleaned out all the subjects and we're, we're good to go.

Chris: 1:14:00

Oh, yay. Yay. The puns continue. So, All right, so my favorite part of the show, pet Peeve of the Week. Mike, we, we primed you for this one and I think you've got a good one. I, I want to hear it.

Mike: 1:14:11

Well, you know, this is, you know, what do they call first world problems? Right? This is not gonna change the world. There are people who have far worse problems than this. But if

Chris: 1:14:21

like to keep this lighthearted, man. We don't want it to be

Mike: 1:14:23

If I go through a drive through, well first, lemme back up. My first job ever when I turned 16, actually I used to work before I was 16, but I was only paid in food. Couldn't pay me money. But when I got my first real

Chris: 1:14:34

very similar experience. Yes.

Mike: 1:14:36

30 cents an hour, it was at McDonald's. Right. Which was physically the hardest job I've ever had to this day. Cuz you had to work back then. So today I don't eat at McDonald's very often, but every once in a while I feel like some french fries. Right. And they make, I still think they make good french fries. So I went through and I ordered, I think I ordered a burger and fries and they, they park you now they just, they, they have these stats they have to meet to get people through their drive-through.

Chris: 1:15:02

Ah,

Mike: 1:15:04

there was no one behind me. And, and, and I ordered, you know, like a burger and fries and a diet coke and she goes, okay, you know, park in space number two. I'm like, I said to her, why? Well so that we can handle other customers. I'm like, but there's no other

Chris: 1:15:19

You looking behind you.

Mike: 1:15:20

Yeah. And I'm like looking into my mirror, there's no one back there. But I've realized, you know, you don't kind of realize and something until you look back on it. Like, this is probably the fourth time I've gone through here this year and I think I've been parked every time. That's their mo just get you out of the drive-through lane,

Chris: 1:15:38

Because they have KPIs they need to

Mike: 1:15:40

They have KPIs and, and I know they don't track, there's no KPI for how long, you know. So one time, it was this year, I think one time I just tried an experiment. I was in a feisty mood and they said, oh, you're gonna have to park in space number 10. And I said, no. And they said, and they looked at me like, that's the, the, it's like I broke the computer, you know, it's like, it's like a crash. And like I said, no, I'm, I'm just, I, and I wasn't being argumentative. I j it was very polite and very cordial. And I just said, no, I'm just gonna stay here. And they said, well, no sir, you have to move on because other people are waiting to get their order. And I'm like, well, I'm one of those people. I'm waiting to get my order. And I'm at the, it says here, pickup. The first window was pay, which I stopped at, and the second window was pickup. And I'm here to pick up my meal. And I knew that if I didn't move, that meal would get ready in half the time.

Melissa: 1:16:37

Uh

Mike: 1:16:38

Right, because they would now have to meet a kpi.

Chris: 1:16:41

That's right.

Mike: 1:16:42

No, I haven't been brave enough to do that. I haven't felt quite, you know, curmudgeony enough to do that again. But that was just kind of a social experiment.

Chris: 1:16:50

the, the pet peeve then, if I'm hearing you correctly, is setting the KPIs wrong. That's the pet peeve. You're setting the KPIs

Mike: 1:16:57

Yeah. They're finding ways around it. And I know that someone in corporate goes, this store's great man. They have great turn through. Look how fast they every customer served in six seconds.

Chris: 1:17:05

funny you should mention there's a team member who works over at CircuitHub and he used to be a like regional manager for McDonald's. And he was telling us how like one of, and by the way, he was a regional manager when he was like 18, like , these are the managers for McDonald's, by the way. Like you think the people flipping burgers are young. You, you don't even know. Anyway, so he's, what his job was, is he would have to order, you know, , whatever was on the menu, right? And then he would have to start a stopwatch and see how long before they took his order, how long before he paid, how long before he picked it up. And then he'd have to pull over and then he'd have to peel apart the food and how many pickles are on there, is there too much mustard and yada yada yada, and give him a report and everything. So they're doing that in person. Well, at least they were 20 years ago. I'm not sure I've , I don't know how long ago he was doing that, but, you know, so it's not necessarily somebody sitting in the office, in the, in Chicago in their headquarters, you know, marking all this down. But there's people in the field doing that lit. I mean, this

Mike: 1:18:07

shoppers. Yeah.

Chris: 1:18:08

secret shopper. Yeah. But then the trouble is they start to recognize, you know, the, the manager's truck, you know, like, ah, make sure you do this one. Right. You know?

Mike: 1:18:16

right. We always knew, we always knew we were being shopped because the manager told us we were being shopped and, and, and we're scheduled to be shopped today at two o'clock. It was, it was, it was a lame thing,

Chris: 1:18:27

that's a.

Mike: 1:18:28

yeah, exactly.

Chris: 1:18:29

Well, the, the other thing I wanna mention to you, Mike, is because I can't help myself when other people bring up their pet peeves, is I try to find solutions. This is just that, I don't know, call it being a, a man or a husband. You know, we, we, we make this mistake all the time and try to provide solutions. And even though people don't want to hear 'em, but this is what we do. You gotta use the app. You get, you get the cheap coffees, you get, you get the deals on the burgers, you gotta use the app. And then I, you know, I make them do the work. I ain't driving through your drive through. You come to me, I'm gonna park my butt right here and you walk out and bring it to me. I don't want to have to step foot, you know, I don't even want to have to navigate around your

Mike: 1:19:05

on the, and they're on the way to my, my order anyway, cuz I'm already parked there waiting. I'm the schmuck that went through the drive-through . So

Chris: 1:19:12

yeah,

Mike: 1:19:13

Yeah, I noticed whenever you go through a drive-through now, they always start off, it's pre-recorded. They go, welcome to McDonald's, will you be using the app today?

Chris: 1:19:21

oh, is it

Mike: 1:19:21

oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris: 1:19:23

See, because there is an option when you do the pickup. You can say, I want to pick up via the drive-through. And I've never done that cuz I didn't know how it worked. Now I know how it worked. Maybe I'll try it sometime. But normally what I do is, cuz I live, I live like just a couple miles from a McDonald's on my way to work and I pass it every single day on my way to work. And if I don't have time to make coffee in the morning or I just feel like having somebody else do it for me, I will very often before I leave my garage, hit the order button. And it's the, the, the app experience. If you get used to it, it's awesome and it's cheaper. Saves you a ton of money. Cuz they all want everybody using the app. They

Mike: 1:19:59

And from what I understand, they are the largest suppliers of coffee in the United States. McDonald's people, people think it's like

Chris: 1:20:04

do.

Mike: 1:20:04

or something, but I think it's McDonald's or Dunking Donuts, but I th

Chris: 1:20:07

I absolutely believe that. Yeah, a hundred percent. And and you know, as far as American coffee is concerned, it ain't too shabby. But I, Mike, I know you've traveled and I know, you know, as well as I do Americans, we get gypped on coffee, the coffee in Europe, and, and oh my gosh, it's so much better in Australia. The coffee in Australia. Off the charts, man. All right. Anyway, thank you for listening to the Greatest Coffee podcast in the world. I'm glad everybody

Mike: 1:20:32

Yeah. We've solved a lot of problems, KPIs and coffee.

Chris: 1:20:35

This has been great though, Mike. What's the best way to, for people to reach out to you if they have other questions about cleaning or, or I p c

Mike: 1:20:41

a few email addresses, but the easiest one to remember is mike mike conrad.com. Just remember, that's Conrad with a K.

Chris: 1:20:47

Conrad,

Mike: 1:20:47

Mike, Mike Conrad dot.

Chris: 1:20:49

d. Yeah. And you spell that Mike, Mr. Clean Conrad, is

Mike: 1:20:53

Like Mr. Clean Conrad. Right, exactly. I'm gonna shave my, first of all, I gotta build like a six pack abs and, you know, and then shave my head and put an earring in and take my shirt off and fold my hands. And that, that's Mr. Clean. I, I don't think I'm, I I don't think I'll ever be confused. With Mr. Clean.

Chris: 1:21:10

No, no. But that's, that's you, you were Mo you were here by memorialized as Mike, Mr. Clean

Mike: 1:21:16

I go. It happened.

Chris: 1:21:18

that's called the call, that's called the callback and the

Mike: 1:21:20

There you go.

Chris: 1:21:21

memorializing.

Mike: 1:21:22

Speaking of biz, I do love, I do love both. I, I love your podcast, Melissa and, and Chris. You guys do a great job. I listen to a lot of podcasts, but there's not a lot to listen to in our industry. And you guys are natural hosts and ask great questions and I'm listening to subjects that I really don't care about sometimes cuz I'm not into the design side. I find it interesting, but I don't have, I don't have a horse in the race, but I still keep listening because you guys are. Both entertaining and, and and, and you're really good hosts. And so I and your guests are pretty cool. So I enjoy listening to your podcast and, you know, your production value's good. Your production quality's good. You guys got it down. So I'm, I'm a fan.

Chris: 1:22:00

Thank you very much. We got all that recorded. Is that correct, Melissa? We didn't miss that.

Melissa: 1:22:03

did

Chris: 1:22:04

All right,

Mike: 1:22:04

Did I read that right?

Chris: 1:22:05

Yeah. well, we're gonna, we're gonna increase the gain on that

Mike: 1:22:10

There you go. All of a sudden it's like, oh, my head's birthing. Yeah,

Chris: 1:22:14

Well, thank you for the compliment. Yeah. We work hard on it and we, we enjoy it. And it's, it's thanks to wonderful guests like yourself and, and so many we've had in the past. We've, we've it's been great and the community we're building around it too, you know, and starting to like, oh, you're Chris Denny from the Pick Place podcast, and that kind of stuff is, is like, what, who I, I thought it'll make grandmother listen to this thing, you know? But Melissa, she has the stats. She tells me more than my grandmother are listening,

Mike: 1:22:38

Yeah, that's when I go to trade shows, people will come up to me and go, yeah, you, you have that reliability podcast. I'm like, yeah. And it feels, you know, I feel like Brad Pitt, you know, going to a

Chris: 1:22:48

speaking of the six pack and the

Mike: 1:22:49

I don't look, I didn't say I look like Brad Pitt, but I feel like Well, that's kind of cool.

Chris: 1:22:53

Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Very good. Yeah. One of the things I was thinking about is it would be fun for a trade show in the future to do some kind of I don't know do something with a booth or do something with,

Mike: 1:23:04

I think that'd be amazing. I think we could, we could do that quite well. We could tag team and, and, and interview people together and things like that. I, I'm speaking in January, late January at Pan Pack, the Pan Pacific Micro Electronic Symposium in Hawaii on the Hawaiian Islands. And I, I'm speaking there and I'm also one of the events there is we're going to record a podcast. Interviewing a guest right there in front of the audience. So it's, part of it is the tech side. This is how a podcast, you know, I'm dragging out all my stuff , you know, so, you know, we're setting up the, the podcast thing so they can see the mixers and the lights and the, you know, mic mics and all the stuff that, all the stuff that is around you. And, and they can watch the podcast getting recorded and they can hear, of course, the conversation and see the conversation. So, yeah. That'll, that'll be fun.

Chris: 1:23:54

So you're doing that for the afternoon session when everybody has a full belly and they get kind of sleepy, so you just, you just put the whole audience to

Mike: 1:24:00

Absolutely. Yeah. And then, and then you know, take money out of their wallets when they're in purses, when they're not, while they're sleeping. Yeah,

Chris: 1:24:07

That'll be me and Melissa sneaking up behind everybody. Yank, yank. Somebody's gotta pay for this

Mike: 1:24:11

great. It's, it's better than a hypnotist, right? I always say my podcast is, is better than Ambien. Because it's very effective and it's certainly not habit forming.

Chris: 1:24:25

I, that's good. That's good. I will have to recommend that. If anybody, if any of my friends ever tell me they have trouble sleeping, I'm gonna recommend the Reliability Matters podcast. Which, there you go. There's your, there's your plug. The so in addition to mike mike conrad.com listen to his podcast, reliability, can you just search for that, like, on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

Mike: 1:24:43

Yeah. It's on all the podcast sites, but if you just Google Reliability Matters podcast. I don't even think you need the word podcast. It'll show up. Yeah. It's also, we also have a YouTube channel. We do a video version of it as well. So, even though I have a face for podcasting and a face for radio

Chris: 1:24:56

Well, if you dress up like Mike, Mr. Clean Conrad, then I think you'll get more viewers.

Mike: 1:25:00

you know, I'll, I'll join a gym membership. That'll be my New Year's resolution. By, by the end of next year, it'll look like

Chris: 1:25:06

Very good. Alright, as always, please email us, Melissa and I, you can reach us at contact pick place podcast.com. You can tweet at us also at CircuitHub or at w Assembly. And as we like to mention lately at the end of each show please tell somebody you knows if you know, if you have a colleague you think might enjoy the show, let 'em know. You know, if you're, if you're listening to this right now, hit pause, walk over and be like, Hey Jim, I think you like this podcast. And apologize for calling Carol Jim and get back to your desk and get to work. So, and please send us show suggestions. We, we love to hear 'em. And we have a bunch. There's so many we want to address, but they require prepar. and when I can just have Mike Conrad come on and talk for an hour, they're much easier to record. So that's why we're doing this. I think so. But please keep 'em coming. We have a few in the chamber and we'll try to address 'em in the futures. But thank you very much for those of you who have written in. But please don't hesitate to write in more

Melissa: 1:25:55

Yeah. And thanks again, Mike, for coming back on the show. You're You're welcome here. Anytime. And I, for one, certainly thought that was more interesting than watching Crass grow, and I hope our listeners do too,

Mike: 1:26:07

Well, the, the expectations were set very low, so I, I didn't have to, I just had to beat the pace of grass, so we're

Chris: 1:26:13

I'm a professional, Mike. I'm a professional. This is what I do.

Mike: 1:26:16

that's the secret to a good podcast. Good ratings. Just let everyone know how bad it is, and then if it's not, it's like my daughter, when she was a teenager, I'd ask her, Hey, how was this? She goes, well, that doesn't suck. This doesn't suck. If it didn't suck, it's, it was great. Right? So,

Chris: 1:26:30

Yeah, we're doing good.

Mike: 1:26:31

My goal is just, you know, not to suck too badly.

Chris: 1:26:34

I like it.

Mike: 1:26:35

Thanks for having me on. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. I always enjoyed talking to you guys. You're

Melissa: 1:26:39

Yeah. And for everyone tuning in, thanks for listening to the Pick Place podcast. If you like what you heard, consider following us in your favorite podcast app, and please leave us a review on Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast from.

Chris: 1:26:53

Thanks very much everybody. Thanks, Melissa. Thanks, Mike.