An Answering Your Questions Grab Bag

At the end of our episodes we've been asking you to send in any questions you had...and we're finally answering them.  In this grab bag episode we discuss topics like what happens to excess parts, the ISO certification process,  the shrinking size of resistors, and more! In honor of spooky season, we also share some scary stories from production.

pickplacepodcast.com

Transcript

Chris: 0:08

Welcome to the PickPlace podcast, a show where we talk about electronics manufacturing and everything related to getting a circuit board into the world. This is Chris Denny with Worthington.

Melissa: 0:16

And this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub.

Chris: 0:19

Melissa,

Melissa: 0:20

Welcome back, Chris, finally.

Chris: 0:22

fresh off of our, uh,. Our world famous YouTube video of impedance control. I

Melissa: 0:27

Oh yeah,

Chris: 0:29

think we're going to be right up there with Casey Neistat, Mr. Beast.

Melissa: 0:34

Absolutely. Absolutely. But we have gotten more views than I thought we would already and some comments. So, thank you very much for everyone who has watched that. And...

Chris: 0:48

I wonder if they took my request seriously and smashed the like button. Hopefully they didn't break their devices when they smashed it.

Melissa: 0:55

Oh, man. Oh,

Chris: 0:58

You remember that was a thing for a while. Like everybody said, smash the

Melissa: 1:01

sure to smash that like button.

Chris: 1:04

but now it's not smash anymore. I forget what they say now. It's not the smash

Melissa: 1:08

I don't know. I haven't had enough time to watch enough YouTube videos to

Chris: 1:14

Yeah, so yeah Amran,

Melissa: 1:15

Yeah, so speaking of fresh off of things, you are fresh off your trip

Chris: 1:20

Omran,

Melissa: 1:21

to Chicago where you visited Omron in Fuji. Omron? Omron. Omron.

Chris: 1:28

I think they're probably both Acceptable correct ways of pronouncing it. Yeah, good suppliers of ours, very happy with their equipment. They happen to be about 30 minutes from each other. Fuji was doing an open house and went out to visit those guys. There's a bunch of people there. Over 100 customers, tons of employees. Really neat stuff. They're working on like totally autonomous machine changeovers. So,

Melissa: 1:51

Mm hmm.

Chris: 1:52

The stencil printer, the solder paste inspection machine, pick and place machines, the reflow oven, the AOI, everything changes itself over, so there's actually like a unit. That will load and unload the stencil automatically built into the stencil printer. There's like this little robot on the front of the pick and place machines on a little, like, railroad. It's the best way I could describe it, that loads and unloads the feeders from the pick and place machines. So, like, when you do a changeover, it automatically switches out the feeders it no longer needs and puts in the feeders that it needs and... Oh, there's... Really wild. I'd never seen anything like it, but yeah, so they were showing all that off. And I had never been, we, you know, we've bought a bunch of Omron inspection equipment. I've never actually been there. And I was like, well, I'm going out for this open house. And these guys are only 30 minutes from each other. May as well pay a visit. It's beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Their building, both, both of their buildings are beautiful. It's actually Omron's US headquarters. So not just their AOI division, but like their relays and their safety. Instruments and their robots and everything. So it's like this huge, huge building. Yeah, it was really nice, but I'm tired. It was

Melissa: 3:03

Jam packed trip.

Chris: 3:05

Yeah, it was jam packed. It was just for one day. I flew out that morning and then we had dinner and then I flew home the next morning, but it was learned a lot. Met a lot of cool people and yeah, it was good. It was like a mini, it was like a mini trade show almost, but just for Fuji.

Melissa: 3:21

Nice, nice.

Chris: 3:22

Some well known businesses there. I'll leave it at that. Some very, some engineers from, from some very well known. Consumer brands customers, actually.

Melissa: 3:33

okay.

Chris: 3:34

It's funny how many companies that we build for that actually have Fuji pick and place equipment, you know, it's like, Oh, why do we build boards for you? If you, but they, they do the production and we do their prototypes and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it was good. But this week, what are we talking about this week, Melissa?

Melissa: 3:54

We're answering some of your questions.

Chris: 3:58

Finally, I've been wanting to do this forever. Yeah. Not, not, not my questions.

Melissa: 4:03

Would get very tangential.

Chris: 4:05

yeah, very quick, very meta. Yeah, so we had we had an awesome response the first time I asked for questions, we had a bunch of suggestions for show topics. A bunch of them. We're going to make a dedicated show for but some of them I thought could fit into a grab bag. So this week it's a grab bag of answering questions. And actually, I think these, all the questions we have in this week's episode are all from one person. A listener named Sarah wrote in a bunch of questions and some of them I do want to do, we can do a whole dedicated show for so we got those lined up and we're actually looking for some like special guests to talk about just that, like just these one topics, some of the questions that she proposed. But some of the other ones I figured would be quick and we'll do a grab bag episode. So that's what we got today.

Melissa: 4:56

Thank you, Sarah, if you're out there listening. We appreciate all of your questions.

Chris: 4:59

thank you, Melissa, for properly pronouncing her name because I'm incapable. of pronouncing Sarah's name. My wife, correct? Yes. You see, you, you somehow are able to put the E in there and I always put like a roll an A into it. Yeah.

Melissa: 5:18

Sarah?

Chris: 5:18

So see, somebody near and dear to my heart, my wife, tells me that I pronounce Sarah wrong

Melissa: 5:27

Sarah? Sarah? Sarah.

Chris: 5:28

and not Sarah. And, and same thing with a woman named Erin and a man named Aaron.

Melissa: 5:38

Aaron.

Chris: 5:41

Apparently I'm incapable of pronouncing those

Melissa: 5:43

I probably pronounce it like the Southern California

Chris: 5:48

That must be it. That must

Melissa: 5:50

Sarah.

Chris: 5:51

Omron or Omron. So let's have it, Melissa.

Melissa: 5:56

All right to get us started, let's see what do we have here. Would you provide the yield of a specific batch or design to the customer? I think this is a valuable KPI to make informed decision. And is the yield of the bare board PCB available to the CM. The reason I'm asking this is because I'm trying to get this information from my current supplier and some of them are really reluctant to provide this and others say that they don't know the yield at the bare PCB level.

Chris: 6:28

That's a great question. Yeah, so our yield. Is, we don't know our yield because we're not usually doing testing and a production environment for sure. We would track the yield but usually see on an assembly level. You're usually able to get, in a production environment, you're usually able to get up to a hundred percent. Like you're usually able to figure out why something failed. It's pretty unusual that you don't, maybe after a certain amount of time, you just write that board off as, not passing a test. But usually you can get up to a hundred percent. You'll now I say a hundred percent, but I'm talking sub 1000 boards. You know, we're not talking tens of thousands here. From the bare board manufacturer, they don't generally give us those yields. I've never really requested them, but I guarantee you they have it because they'll come back to us sometimes and they'll tell us, Hey, you know, we, we really struggled. on this board because of XYZ and the design was very challenging and we had to scrap a lot of boards. Can you, you know, talk to your customer about making some small changes here and there that would improve things? So, for example, we had one customer that was doing six mil traces and gaps between traces, six mil but they needed two ounce copper and that's very difficult to do with six mil tracking gap. So they said, Hey, could you do eight or even 10? Could you ask your customer if that was possible to do a redesign? Cause we really struggled to get the yield up. So we have seen it before. I think that was a particularly rough situation for our supplier. So they reached out to us about that, but yeah, I. I'm confident you could get it from them. You might not be able to get it posthumously. Is that the right phrase? Posthumously?

Melissa: 8:17

posthumously.

Chris: 8:19

Yeah, it's the right phrase for when somebody dies, but I'm not sure it's the right phrase for after an order has been fulfilled.

Melissa: 8:25

After the order is dead.

Chris: 8:27

Yeah. You know, like, you know, let's say Tom Petty got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame posthumously. Actually, I think he was inducted in before he was. passed on from this earth, but that's, that's the phrase you use for that kind of situation. I'm not sure if you use that for after a board is shipped, but if you ask for it ahead of time, I'm sure you can get it. You can ask them, you know, if you shipped us a thousand, how many did you have to scrap to get to a thousand? I'm confident that a bare board manufacturer could get you that information. From a contract manufacturer's level, from the assembly level The yield number, it depends, if we're building prototypes for somebody, we're only building 50 boards or something like that, the yield is going to be, , 50 for 50, that's what we're aiming for. We're probably not going to measure the yield. But if you ask us if there was any assembly issues, you know, we'll be able to provide some feedback and say, yeah, you know, we struggled with this and this is how we worked around it. And a lot of times we're proactive about that too. So we'll tell you like what we struggled with and we'd ask if you could, you know, make room for improvement and your design in the We only built five pieces, but if you plan on ordering more than five pieces in the future, we're really need to get, custom tools made to hold things or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, listen, the answer to this question is going to be like, I'll answer all of our other questions. Have a conversation. But if you have that conversation ahead of time and you say we're trying to chase down some issues here. Could you, could you tell us what your yields are? Or could you tell us, you know, what you're struggling with? And I'm confident any, any CM would be able to work with you on that. And, and the bare board supplier, I'm confident they would. After you've received the order and you're struggling, would they have that information? Not necessarily. They may not have, you know, if they weren't asked to track that information ahead of time, they may not have it after they've shipped the order, but yeah, they might. It's possible. Depends on their process and, and you know, what their, what their focus is on, I guess. So hopefully that answers that question.

Melissa: 10:27

Okay, so next, what happens to the excess parts when you buy parts? Normally there is a buffer or percent excess. If it isn't used, what happens to it? Mm-hmm.

Chris: 10:39

So we call this buying with attrition or with attrition in mind. So if we're going to build a hundred boards for somebody and you have a really expensive QFN or whatever, we're going to order 102 or 103 of those QFNs. If you, if it's just a cheap 10K resistor, we're probably going to order. An entire reel or at least, you know, like 200 of them, you know, or, you know, whatever, we're going to order tons of extra because the extra is going to be like 50 cents. It's, it's like not even going to matter. In that case, it's scrapped. We have a recycler that comes and takes our electronics. Cause there's a lot of good, it's a lot of gold in them. Silver, valuable materials, and they like that stuff. So, usually it gets scrapped if there's just, you know, so if we bought 103 QFNs, we needed 101 of them, two are left over, that's going to get scrapped. Yeah. That's, that's the reality. If we buy. an enormous excess of something quite expensive, we might hold it, especially if we expect that you'll place a subsequent order. But that's pretty unusual, and usually that's like a conversation that's taking place ahead of time. You know, you're coming to us and you're saying, hey this expensive connector. We got a good deal worked out with Samtec buy from them, buy a thousand of them and hold them. We'll have you build a hundred, but then we got another order for 500 after that. You use it for that., but usually, holding material, managing material, stocking material is expensive. So we try to avoid it as much as possible. It doesn't seem expensive, so it's just one reel of connector as well. Multiply that times. You know, thousands. Yeah. Yep. It

Melissa: 12:16

It's crazy. Oh my gosh. Yeah,

Chris: 12:18

Yeah, we have, we have well over I think we're close to a hundred thousand unique line items in our database of material we've worked with. So you can just imagine how crazy it would get if

Melissa: 12:30

if we held on to all of that. Yeah. Can I tell you what I would like to do with all those parts? It's a project. Yeah, this is a project that I've thought about doing for years, but of course I've never had, like a hobby project,

Chris: 12:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Melissa: 12:46

But I've never, of course, had the time to actually do it. Is I want to create an abstract Piece of art with all of the yeah. The excess parts that were just gonna get thrown away.

Chris: 12:57

That would be pretty

Melissa: 12:58

Yeah.

Chris: 12:59

neat. Yo, you know what you should do? Remember when you were a kid and you would like put the glue down and then sprinkle the glitter on it?

Melissa: 13:05

yeah, yeah,

Chris: 13:06

do that, but with the,

Melissa: 13:07

That's a lot easier than, you know, to spread out some glue and see what happens

Chris: 13:12

yeah. That's cool. I like it.

Melissa: 13:15

one day. One day.

Chris: 13:16

day. One day.

Melissa: 13:18

Alright, moving on out on P C B panels. What are they there for and what happens to them? I think we've touched a little bit on this, on one of our episodes with Dave.

Chris: 13:28

and yeah, and I think probably we didn't explain them very well. I think this, this question is in response to that episode. They're called Xouts because the PCB supplier will literally draw an X on the PCB.

Melissa: 13:43

With like a sharpie.

Chris: 13:44

to build it. Yeah, with a Sharpie or,

Melissa: 13:46

Some other

Chris: 13:47

yeah, so like on, like a, like a high temp crayon. Literally, it's

Melissa: 13:50

Oh, okay.

Chris: 13:52

Yeah, because it leaves, it leaves a good mark on it. A lot of times. So, like, if it's a green board, they're just going to use, like, a Sharpie. If it's a blackboard, though, they're Not going to see a black sharpie. So they use some kind of like, you know, you can scrape it with your fingernail. I don't know what it is. It's, it feels like some kind of high temp crayon or something. It so an X out. Remember, I just talked about our PCB supplier struggling with a two ounce copper board.

Melissa: 14:16

Mm

Chris: 14:17

So that board was in like a four up panel. It was like a two by two array. And so they would send us all the panels and, you know, one or two within the array, sometimes even three would have an X out on them. And those are same, same deal. We don't populate those. We do stencil print them because it's... Like you're not going to mask it off. So you're going to put solder on them, but then they get recycled along with everything else. Cause there's still really good gold in there. Silver, tin, copper, there's really good stuff in there. So they get recycled there. You know, they, they pay us to take, take those away. It's not much. I mean, it's like more or less pays for the shipping and, you know, buy some pizza, but yeah, it's, it's really very little, but yeah, that gets recycled and they're there because in that panel. There's still two or three good boards, so you don't want to just, you know, throw, throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, right?

Melissa: 15:12

hmm.

Chris: 15:13

I, I recommend against that, newly, newly mothered

Melissa: 15:16

hmm.

Chris: 15:18

It's, it's, it doesn't work. Yeah, you get, yeah, there's police and it's a whole thing.

Melissa: 15:25

Well, I mean also she won't fit down the drain

Chris: 15:27

Oh, good point. Yeah, good point. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, that's what Xouts are. And and the way we manage those is we put a we agree ahead of time in the engineering phase. Whoever's programming the machines, they'll determine a location to put a a colored dot. We use a yellow colored dot and it's just a sticker. It's about. Quarter inch diameter and they stick that to the board and wherever the engineer told them to stick that sticker to the board and then the downward looking cameras and all the machines will look for that dot and if they see it, they'll skip it so they won't populate it and they won't inspect it and so forth. So that's how we manage it internally. Yeah, there's some shops Like ourselves that refuse to let their p c b suppliers send them X outs. You gotta pay like a premium. I, you know, it depends on the shop. It's like anywhere from 20 to 30% more per P C B, and they'll pass that cost onto their customers. They'll just, you know, and, and you, the customer will never have any idea that you're paying that extra 20% just so they don't have to deal with X outs

Melissa: 16:33

So the Total number of so if what happened, they just have to completely rebuild the panel

Chris: 16:40

Yeah,

Melissa: 16:41

oh, okay.

Chris: 16:41

yeah, they'll scrap them. They'll scrap them and they'll recycle those panels that had X outs on them. Yep, they'll never ship them.

Melissa: 16:47

Let's see.

Chris: 16:48

But but we accept X outs because we have a good process for managing them. And there's a little bit of cost savings there for our customers. They don't have to pay the extra cost. So,

Melissa: 16:58

Yeah, prob and it seems less wasteful too.

Chris: 17:00

It's, yeah, that's what I like about it too. It is, it is, it is less wasteful. Yeah.

Melissa: 17:05

Okay, Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3 IPC 610 Specifications. What is the difference?

Chris: 17:13

This could probably be a whole episode, but I included it in our grab bag because,

Melissa: 17:18

you don't want to make it a

Chris: 17:19

Well, no, I don't, only because it would be, like, it would have to be a whole show. It, like, the book for IPC is, you know, Moby Dick is a quicker read. You could finish, you know, all of the Harry Potter books faster than you could finish the IPC book. It is a monster.

Melissa: 17:39

was there an IPC pod podcast out there yet?

Chris: 17:42

I don't know, they should have one, though. But for all intents and purposes, like, okay, obviously, you don't want to know every little difference, but you want to get it. You want to get a flavor for what are the differences. A lot of it has to do with, like, How much solder is, on the solder joint, be it through hole or surface mount, it's about volume, it's about coverage, it's about wetting, like totals. So for example is the wetting around the through hole lead 75 percent or less, then it doesn't meet class 3, because class 3 requires 100%, I believe. I don't know. I haven't memorized it, obviously. I'm not an inspection. But you know, so there's like, when you're, when you're building IPC Class 1, those are generally, like, borderline disposable products. Giveaways, toys things that you just really don't care about the reliability of. And that's maybe, like, 5 percent of the Output of the world's electronics. IPC class two is by far like 90 percent or more of what products are built to. And you know, that's somewhere in between class one and class two. Then class three is more like, that's your, this is going into space. This is going into a human body. Like, like a pacemaker, you know, this is you know, going to be used for, for a weapon, you know, like you cannot fail under no circumstances may it fail. IPC is not just how it's soldered. It's also how it's designed. So like all of the footprints have to be designed for IPC class three, all of the routing. Has to meet IPC class three, you know, so requesting an assembly house to solder the product to IPC class three, while it can be done, that does not mean that the product itself meets IPC class three. If the design has not been validated to meet IPC class three. So yeah, so for example, I mean, the cost difference is literally 10 X, at least minimum. For IPC class three stuff, minimum. Like I was talking to when I was at Fuji, I was talking to a defense contractor and they were describing this product. It was a board that was like 10 inches by 10 inches and had over 8, 000 placements.

Melissa: 20:13

Wow.

Chris: 20:14

yeah. Oh yeah. It had like over 800 QFNs and, and it's 32 layers thick.

Melissa: 20:21

Whoa.

Chris: 20:22

Yeah, or 32, yeah, 32 layer PCB and I forget how many millimeters thick it was, but you know, it's something that a soldier wears for, I forget what he said exactly is the application, but it's, you know, they make a lot of them because they give them to each soldier and in this particular regiment and it's not the right word. What's, what, anyway, if you're this particular type of soldier, you each get one of these and they sell each, they charge their customer over 50, 000 per board.

Melissa: 20:50

Wow.

Chris: 20:54

So I don't know what their customer is charging the, the army or the navy or whoever's

Melissa: 20:59

Yeah, because that's just the board, that's not the

Chris: 21:01

Right. Right. Yeah. So when you talk class three, it's a just, it's a totally different game. I am totally unqualified to discuss class three. I, it's just not the world I live in at all. It's like asking, you know, a general practitioner to describe, you know, laser eye surgery. No, this, you know, I might be a doctor, but I don't know how to do laser eye surgery.

Melissa: 21:28

Well, yeah. Any listeners out there, if you are an IBC Class 3 expert and you would like to come on the show,

Chris: 21:36

yeah, actually, that would be a lot of fun. Please. Yeah, we could do a follow up episode on the different classes and your experience with it. So by all means. All right. That's enough of that,

Melissa: 21:45

Okay, okay. I just wanted to make sure. Here's your favorite one. How do you stay ISO certified and what does the audit include?

Chris: 21:55

It's funny. We're actually having our ISO audit today as a matter of fact. ISO they're, they're, we're not going to have a whole episode on this only because

Melissa: 22:06

I wanted to and Chris said no.

Chris: 22:07

No, I'm again, another one where I'm just not qualified to discuss it well enough. We, we might be able to have like an auditor come on the show or something, maybe our consultant, but there is a standard, you know, ISO 9001. I think the current standard is 2015 or 2018. I think it's 15.

Melissa: 22:24

hmm. 15, I think.

Chris: 22:25

Yeah, and you know, you read the standard and you just comply with it. And, and it's it's vague on purpose because it doesn't necessarily apply to electronics manufacturing or plastic manufacturing, but we both use the same standard. It's just how do you ensure quality? So it's basic stuff like, how do you make sure you don't use expired material? When you buy parts, how do you validate that you're buying the correct part? How do you do your checks and balances? How do you maintain your quality? And there's a whole process to it. We hire a consultant that helps us with it. Because ISO is its own language., the big joke is that you need to know how to speak Iso nese.

Melissa: 23:04

hmm. Mm hmm.

Chris: 23:05

You know, just to play on words there because it's, it's like knowing its own language and, and, and how to control all that. So I, I don't, you know, get too heavily involved in the audits. Our president. Neal normally handles that along with David, previous guest of the show, David Mulherin handles that for us. But yeah, it's best left up to consultants to guide you along the way to make sure you're staying compliant and those sorts of things. And you, and you start to learn it. And basically what you do is like, not everybody needs to be able to speak ISO knees in the company, but you need to set up processes that they follow that keep you within compliance. So, if you let's say, you know, a lot of times we have to hand dispense solder paste for whatever reason. Well, we're going to take that solder paste out of a jar from the manufacturer and we're going to put it into a dispense tube. Well, that dispense tube is just a clear plastic tube. How do we know what's inside of it after, after we fill it? Well, you got to label it. So that's an example of, of, you know, the process is after you fill that dispense tube, label it with the, with the you know, the appropriate information of what you took it from. And that way there, if let's say it's flammable, you know, solder paste is not flammable, but let's say there was something flammable in it and you repackaged it into a tube. Well, you got to put on that tube, hey, this contains something flammable. For example, so you just, you set up the processes that people follow to keep you compliant. And that's why you have a quality management team. And yeah, it's, it's. You know, it's a fair bit of work. I'll be honest. It is, it takes some effort, but the end result is your, your customers can trust that you're

Melissa: 24:43

Yeah.

Chris: 24:44

high quality products. And then part of ISO is that you you either buy from vendors that are also ISO to keep you within compliance or you audit your vendors to make sure that. It's you know, meeting the quality standards that you need. So like, for example, we buy injection molded parts from a company for one of our customers and they have ISO 9001 2015. So we. Part of our ISO management system is we get their certificate to prove that our, our supplier is within compliance and we get that, you know, each year to make sure we stay up to date with it and customers ask us for our ISO certificates and we send that to them. And yeah, so that's, it's a, it's a pretty complicated thing that would, we could probably have another episode on it, but we would have to have more of an expert, I think, to discuss it. At length. And I would need, I don't know, some kind of like, continuous drip of Red Bull to keep me awake, I think. Yeah.

Melissa: 25:45

hmm.

Chris: 25:45

Yeah.

Melissa: 25:47

What do you mean, it would be thrilling? The entire thing?

Chris: 25:50

Yeah, I think, I think we've said enough about ISO.

Melissa: 25:53

All right this is a little bit more thrilling. How much smaller will resistors get? 01005. Can it get any smaller?

Chris: 26:04

Yeah. So we, we, we use the phrases like 0402, 0201. These are imperial measurements. These mean 0. 004 by 0. 002. 0402, right? Or 01005 means 1, 000th of an inch by half a thousandth of an inch. It starts to get a little crazy because when you get smaller than 01005, now you start to say 008004.

Melissa: 26:29

Yeah,

Chris: 26:30

So,

Melissa: 26:30

off the tongue.

Chris: 26:31

at a certain point everybody decided that we're just going to switch to using metric at this point because it just got too small. So, they call it the 01005 they call 0402 metric, and the 008004 they call 0201 metric, and that's currently the smallest We, I have some, actually if you,

Melissa: 26:51

see them though?

Chris: 26:52

yeah I have some pictures,

Melissa: 26:54

do you have, it's, it basically just looks like dust.

Chris: 26:57

it looks like dust, yeah, in fact, I think dust looks larger than these, to be honest with you

Melissa: 27:02

not exaggerating.

Chris: 27:03

yeah, not exaggerating at all, there's got to be a way we can host some images and link to them. Remind me, Melissa, I'll get you some images. I put them on a dollar bill and I put them under a video microscope and took some screenshots just to see just how small they are compared to, you know, like, like the grooves in my, in my finger. Like they fit in the grooves of my fingerprint. It's crazy. There's how small they are. So, I'll try to get some pictures

Melissa: 27:37

yeah. We don't work with anything that small, at

Chris: 27:39

We, we do 01005, Metric 0402. Yeah, those we do I would say regularly every couple of weeks, probably. Eh, maybe every month we get an order with those. They're going to start to become pretty common and, but we're. We're fine. We're totally prepared for that. It's they, they go well. It's funny though, because I remember when I first got started in this industry, you know, I remember talking to guys and they're like, you know, they're complaining about 0603s and they're like, I'll tell you what, if the ever, if the 0402 ever gets popular, I'm going to retire. And they,

Melissa: 28:13

Oh man.

Chris: 28:14

yeah,

Melissa: 28:15

Then they must be long retired.

Chris: 28:17

yeah. They must be long cause now 0201 is like nothing. Like every single day we're doing 0201, right? So, and then in 0101, it's like, I don't know. I think there's just grumpy. I like the challenge. I think it's fun. Contract manufacturing is more fun than, than building your own product, in my opinion, because you're presented with new challenges regularly and you have to figure them out all the time. You know,

Melissa: 28:40

Multiple times a day in our case.

Chris: 28:43

Multiple times a day. It can be really frustrating too, but it, you know, challenges are fun. There's a reason people do puzzles and play video games because challenges are fun. I'm enjoying it.

Melissa: 28:55

I think that's all of the questions. This is more of a general section that we're going to include.

Chris: 29:03

Yeah.

Melissa: 29:03

correct? Yeah.

Chris: 29:05

Yeah. So, Sarah also asked about scary stories that we've dealt with in manufacturing. I have loads of scary stories. Loads of just, okay. I will try to keep this under 30 minutes

Melissa: 29:17

Oh, no.

Chris: 29:17

'cause I know you have to

Melissa: 29:18

I only have 30 minutes, so.

Chris: 29:21

We had this one customer where we were building the boards perfectly fine, had no issues, and then all of a sudden had issues, and then didn't have issues, and then had issues, and it was bridging on these BGAs, and we couldn't figure out what was going on. These were really micro BGAs, I think these were 0. 4 millimeter, maybe even 0. 35 millimeter BGAs, really fine pitch. You know, these balls are tiny, super close to each other. What was happening was batch to batch, we were getting inconsistent thickness of silkscreen. And what was happening was there was silkscreen around the BGAs that were lifting the stencil off of the board. and causing excess Oh, it's crazy. So now whenever we get those kinds of components that are that small, we just say no silkscreen, just nowhere. So this particular customer, we actually, from now on, everything we build for them, they get no silkscreen anywhere on the board, just does not exist. That way there, we just solve that all together, because they do, like, everything they do is super fine pitch, right? So, there was just, it was just easier to just scorched earth, just nuclear option, no silkscreen at all, and so no more bridging on those BGAs. That was, that was Really confusing one. We had one customer, they had these, these really long, like 200 pin connectors. And we had issues with the connectors were not coplanar. That's a big fancy word. Basically we need each of the leads to be perfectly on the same plane so that when you go to solder them, they all solder uniformly. If any of them are not coplanar, in other words, if some of the leads are bent up in the air, just a little bit, they would not be soldered. Well, the manufacturer of these connectors just could not keep them consistent enough. And it's also, you get a flexing of the connector in the reflow oven that's different than the flexing of the PCB in the reflow oven. So. You would just get inconsistent soldering and sometimes it would wet, sometimes it wouldn't wet. So we said, fine, what we'll do is we'll just add, we'll overprint the solder. We'll print the solder onto the masking. So overprint, increase the volume of solder. Well, we went too far. And now we had all kinds of bridging.

Melissa: 31:54

Mm hmm.

Chris: 31:56

It took a while to find our Goldilocks solder volume on that one, but we finally did. Oh, I had. This nightmare job, nightmare. It wasn't the job, the job was fine, but there are these a lot of customers like to put shields over their devices. I'm not sure what the application is for. I think they're trying to prevent like radio RF interference. So they put shields, but they don't always want to put the solder, the shield from us. They want to, they want to have us put clips down and then we'll solder the clips in place. And then when they get them, they'll do other tests and everything. And then they'll put a shield on top of it where it gets clipped in by the clips. So these shield clips, I could not get the machine to pick these parts out of the tape consistently. It just would not pick. And I, Melissa, I spent. Easily, easily 20 hours trying to figure out what was wrong with this, trying everything. I was here till like two in the morning, multiple days in a row, testing this, could not figure out what was going on. I finally called the manufacturer and I said, Hey, look, I need your help. I'm struggling here. Like, you know, can you put me in touch with one of your customers? I want to pick their brain about how they get the, how they're able to pick up these clips, Melissa.

Melissa: 33:15

hmm.

Chris: 33:18

They get back to me the next day and they say, Hey, what's the lot number

Melissa: 33:23

Oh,

Chris: 33:24

on that reel? And I'm like, it's lot ABC one, two, three, whatever. They're like, Oh, we had a problem with the carrier tape shrinking around the clips. They're like, yeah, you're not the only one. Nobody can pick these parts out of the tape

Melissa: 33:44

like, thanks, buddy. Thanks

Chris: 33:45

was like, you gotta be kidding me. I just like.

Melissa: 33:50

Please pay me for these X number of hours that I just spent wasting my time.

Chris: 33:54

it was awful. It was awful. But at least I was glad I wasn't going crazy, you know? And the other thing was we had built this job on our Micronic equipment. You know, and then a few months later we go to build a job on our Fuji equipment because it was during the transition. So I thought it was something we were doing wrong on the Fuji equipment because we didn't have the problem on the Micronic equipment. I was going crazy. It was going absolutely crazy. Anyway, that was, that's probably the scariest story I have because that was the most painful thing I dealt with. Let's see. Oh, oh, oh my gosh. We had. A customer sent us a bunch of parts and they told us, you know, the volumes of all the parts, you know, 500 of this, 600 of that, whatever. And we did not count the parts. We didn't have an efficient means of counting the parts. So we would go to run the job and then we'd run out of, you know, there's like, there was like 150 unique part numbers on this build and we'd go to run the job and it'd be like, Oh, we ran out of part A. Oh, well. We don't have any more of part A, so stop running. Alright, order more part A. Alright, we can run again. Ran out of part B. Oh, we don't have any more of part B. Alright, well stop running. You know, change over, tear down, like the whole thing. We must have changed over and torn down these feeders, I kid you not, like six or seven times. Until finally somebody's like, Hey, can we just count every single part?

Melissa: 35:26

Yeah, yeah.

Chris: 35:27

And it was time consuming, and we did, and it was awful. And then we bought an x ray counter.

Melissa: 35:32

Mhm. Is that what is that specifically why? Is

Chris: 35:35

That was, that was the experience we went through that told us we can no longer trust anybody's counts. Like, we trust Digikey's counts, we trust Mouser's counts, right? But

Melissa: 35:45

Yeah, but they have part counters.

Chris: 35:47

have part counters. They, and they count the parts before they send them to us. So now, from now on, we count the parts. So, and, and, and, if, If the parts are going to stock, so like if we, if we finish running a job and we're going to put those parts back in stock, before we put those parts into a fresh kit, we count them again. So they go back on a shelf, but then when they're about to be pulled for the next kit, say three months later, We count them in the X ray counter. Cause we don't know when we, you know, say we built 500 boards and we ordered 2000 parts, well, we should have 1500 left, right? Well, not necessarily. Cause we might've, you know, machine might've rejected a couple and blah, blah, blah. And now we only have 1, 492.

Melissa: 36:29

Mhmm.

Chris: 36:30

Right? So, yeah, so we count them before we put them back into the kit. Oh, that was such a painful experience. It was like, Oh my gosh, I can't even. That work order became like a curse word.

Melissa: 36:40

Mhmm.

Chris: 36:42

Nobody wanted to talk about it. Oh, we, we had this ongoing problem with stencil apertures being too small. I think we've discussed this a little bit. This, I definitely want to have a whole episode on stencil design. We'll get Brett on the show for that. But we had, we were ordering stencils with apertures that were too small. And so the apertures kept getting clogged and we didn't know that they were too small because we were trusting our vendor saying, Hey, look, you should be able to print with apertures with this area ratio. We're like, fine. Okay. They all meet this area ratio and we get it and we couldn't print. I was like, what is going on? Finally, we said, forget it. You know what we. We're just going to, we're just going to prove our own process for ourselves. So what we did is we, you know, just said, okay, here's a test bed, all these different aperture sizes, what works, what doesn't work, and we found. That what the vendor was telling us was far from reality. And so we changed our area ratio minimum. And we said, this is our minimum just period from now on. This is the only, this is the lowest we'll ever allow stencil apertures to get. And ever since we did that, I can't tell you how smooth our stencil printing process has gone. But for years we would struggle with apertures too small. And we would have all kinds of issues and couldn't get consistent prints and it was just killing us. And just, we had so many different painful, jobs trying to run and just couldn't get the solder out of the apertures and oh, yeah, that wasn't any one experience. That was like, that was like a hard lesson learned, you know, trust, but verify, I guess you could say, trust your vendors, but verify your vendors as well, whatever they tell you. Oh, oh man, we had a customer who had these long connectors. These long connectors, through hole connectors. And I don't know if you've ever seen, Melissa, I know you have seen, but listeners, you probably haven't seen how a PCB vendor moves their boards throughout a factory. Oftentimes they're put into these, these racks and because circuit boards are rigid, they're stood kind of straight up in the air at a little bit of an angle. Just a very slight angle, maybe like 15, 20 degrees, but more or less straight up in the air. Well, these super long connectors were cause they were on both sides. They were like getting intertwined with each other, even though we put like gaps between them, they were getting intertwined with each other and like ripping, ripping each other apart. So you'd get like stuck together and you'd go to, Oh, it was awful. It was awful. You'd go to grab a board and it would just like tear itself and destroy the board. You're like, no, we've, you know, we've already put so much time and energy into this. That was not fun, not fun, but it was just as easy as just, okay, we'll increase the spacing between them. And then I think what we ended up doing is we just put them on trays. We said, forget it. You know, they're just, they're just too fragile. We just put them on, on, laid them flat on these trays and we moved them around the factory and trays rather than racks. That was a fun one. We had, we had this board from a customer that was literally impossible to depanelize. We'd never seen anything like it. There was a USB C port on the top side hanging over the edge. And then there was like a Bluetooth module with an antenna on the opposite side hanging over the edge. And... There was the waste material of the panel between the two and there was no way to separate them. I forget what we did. I think we like dremeled them apart or something. I don't know what we did. I'm not sure how we ended up doing it. I know we got them apart. But then we went to our it wasn't a customer design issue. I mean, ideally we like hanging over parts on all on the same side, but this is a regular thing. We ended up going back to our our design team that makes the panels. And we said, Hey, you got to put relief so that when we break these things apart, we have a relief for where they break and, you know, you know, cut out in the panel that we can put this USB C port can fall into when we, when we go to bend the waste material away. That was awful. We had we had these, like, incredibly thick PCBs that were so thick that we, like, could not depanelize them, so we put them in our normal panel, like, not even thinking about it, but these were, these were, like, quarter inch thick boards. They were, it was, like, absurd, and I think we did have to dremel those. I think that was the only way we got through them was literally dremeling them apart. Yeah, that was awful. Depaneling! Ugh! I have one here about a customer's plastic covers melting in the reflow oven, but I don't remember what that was.

Melissa: 41:25

This doesn't sound good.

Chris: 41:27

No. Plastic melting in the reflow oven. It was on a surface mount part. But I don't remember what it was. A plastic cover. Must have heard it at the time, but I don't remember what it was. Because when we got this question, I started writing down, like, each time something painful happened, I started writing it down. We had one... Panel design. This is again, our fault, not our customer's fault. We designed these panels in a way that they were way too flexible. It was like a, it was like a 16 inch long panel. And like, it was like a five by two. So it was, it was two rows. With five boards in each row, 16 inches long, right? And we only held on the short edge of those rows. So the whole rows were like diving boards. They were, they were super flexible and they would just fall apart. You just pick them, you would just pick up the panels and they would just fall apart in your hands. And we had like hundreds of these panels. Oh. That was so painful. I think what we ended up doing is we ordered like custom tooling and we just put each panel into them and we had to process the whole order that way. Yeah, that was pretty painful. Again, self inflicted. We had another that, that was self inflicted. This one was not self inflicted. This one was, we had a customer that had, they had a requirement for 1. 2 millimeter thick PCB, but then they ordered hybrid components that had through hole leads that were 1. 6 millimeter on both sides of the board.

Melissa: 42:56

Mm.

Chris: 42:56

So you'd go, yeah, you'd go to run one side and you had these through hole components sticking through. So then you couldn't stencil print the opposite side.

Melissa: 43:03

Yeah.

Chris: 43:04

Oh, it was, it was a total nightmare. We were like, what, what, what are we going to do? How are we going to, I forget. I think, I know how we build them now is, is we get the connectors that are. They have the through hole leads that are 1. 2 millimeters long. They're designed for the correct thickness. I forget how we ended up processing that order at all. I have no idea how we did it. We must've, maybe we jet printed them rather than stencil printing them or something. I'm not sure. We got through it though. Remember we got through it. That was painful. What else, what else, what else? Oh yeah there were these capacitors, ceramic capacitors near the edge of the board. And they were ceramic capacitors are very brittle. They're strong, but they're brittle. They can crack very easily. And they were near the edge of the board, and while we were depaneling the board the, the, the, the force going into the board literally cracked. Those ceramic capacitors because they were so close to the edge. Yeah, that was awful. Because it was a lot of, it was a lot of boards. There's a lot of capacitors and we had to remove them all and solder new ones on order, you know, order new parts. It was no fun. And oh yes. Yes. We had, so we have a customer that has two flavors of the exact same PCB, exact same SMT, except for two parts. And then exact same through hole, except for two parts. So they looked like identical and we ended up soldering hundreds of boards. The SMT was correct, but we put the wrong through hole parts in the board, hundreds of boards, and they were these big, heavy. Difficult to rework through whole parts. They were not easy to pull out and these were expensive boards, so we couldn't, we couldn't like scrap them and rebuild or anything. Ah, we were swimming in these boards because we built hundreds of them. This is like confessions of Worthington

Melissa: 45:00

hmm. Oh. Yeah, I was just thinking that.

Chris: 45:02

Yeah, that was painful. We, I mean, we still, we, we build these boards regularly. You know, what we ended up doing is we ended up. Telling our PCB vendor we need half the boards built with blue solder mask and the other half built with green solder mask. And then our kits, we put green tape on the kits for the green boards. And we put blue tape on the kits for the blue boards. So, so everything's color coded now and that's how we easily keep everything separate. And make sure that we don't put the incorrect components on anything. Cause they, they look identical, like you would never notice visually that these are different boards. We were mixing them up and yeah, it made life much easier to color code. Color, by the way, pro tip, color coding, everything, just color code it. It's so good.

Melissa: 45:48

Everything in your life,

Chris: 45:49

Everything in your life, everything in your life is color coded. Can't keep track of your kids names? Color code them. All right. Yeah. So that's, those are my scary stories there and grab bag. Thank you, Sarah, for your questions. Keep them coming. I know we have a few more to answer, but we want to make some dedicated episodes to them to talk about like, like stencils, for example. Somebody had a question about stencils. We're gonna have a dedicated episode on that. Somebody asked about RoHS3 and Conflict Minerals.

Melissa: 46:19

Mm. That's a good one.

Chris: 46:21

yeah, that'd be a real good one. So we want to get somebody from the soldering industry on for that. Yeah, somebody asked about the programming process and how, you know, how we get set up for a build. We can have a dedicated episode about that. Yeah, so there's, there's a few here that, that we'll, we'll follow up later and have a dedicated episode. But now... It's my favorite. As if I wasn't complaining enough or doing my confessions enough, my favorite part of the show. I am ready for it. I haven't gotten to do the one in a while,

Melissa: 46:46

Yeah, it's been quite a while. Probably months, actually.

Chris: 46:50

Okay,

Melissa: 46:52

Let's hear it.

Chris: 46:52

let's talk about flying. Now, I know everybody has flying pet peeves and, and this is not original. This is not an original pet peeve. You know,

Melissa: 47:03

But it's relatable, so that's what's important. That's why people come to listen to the pet peeves.

Chris: 47:08

I, I love efficiency.

Melissa: 47:11

Is it about boarding?

Chris: 47:12

it's, it's, it's about boarding and, and everything. It's like, okay, I had. The very last seat on the plane, like the very back up against, you know, like where the flight attendants are in the, in the bathrooms is on Airbus A320. And I was one of the last people to board. I thought to myself, this makes no sense. This makes no sense. This is so inefficient, but that's how they do it. And, and, and I think there's some like cycle. I remember seeing some YouTube video recommended to me and I should have watched it about why they're boarded wrong. But that's only part of my pet peeve that I think we've, we may have even touched on this already. I think, I think we already had this as a pet peeve.

Melissa: 47:58

yeah, we might have I don't know if it was on the show or just us complaining to each other Oh, yeah. Yeah, but oh, sorry. I just wanted to add that I just saw an article that I think United is changing the way that they're boarding

Chris: 48:11

Well, that's who I flew.

Melissa: 48:12

I think they're changing it next, or the end of this month or something, next month.

Chris: 48:17

Okay.

Melissa: 48:18

They're changing it so that people that are in the window seats board first.

Chris: 48:23

That makes sense.

Melissa: 48:24

Might be other changes. But then I saw some comment that said that they actually already tried to do this. Change it to this way a while back and then they ended up abandoning it because I think By the time that you get all of the people that have different, you know Priority boarding and all these different statuses and stuff then it doesn't really make a difference anyways

Chris: 48:48

Boarding a plane early is not a benefit

Melissa: 48:52

then you're stuck on a plane.

Chris: 48:54

stuck in a

Melissa: 48:54

Well, I think the only benefit is then you get to, if you have carry on luggage, you can store it.

Chris: 49:01

So. Okay, this is, this is also a problem with the fact that they should not be charging for check, for checking your bags. That's why there's so much carry-on luggage.'cause nobody wants to pay to check their bags.

Melissa: 49:11

yeah.

Chris: 49:12

So either charge for both or charge for neither, because you're just shooting yourself in the foot. you know, that's what ends up happening. So I bring a backpack, but they don't consider that a carry-on item. So I'm never allowed to put it in the overhead bin. I have to, I have to treat it like a purse and shove it down by my feet. So then I have my, the seat is way too small. And I'm, like, granted, I'm a typical American male size person, right? But I'm not, like, an especially large American male. And I'm quite uncomfortable, and I can't imagine how... You know, somebody who's over six feet tall and over 200 pounds. Like they're going to be pretty uncomfortable sitting in these seats. And the guy next to me, he had the middle seat, so I was not about to encroach on him, but he was a big fella and he was spilling into my seat.

Melissa: 50:00

Yeah, yeah.

Chris: 50:01

And then I'm in the back row, so I can't recline. And then the guy in front of me reclines and I'm like

Melissa: 50:05

yeah.

Chris: 50:06

what alternate universe am I in right now where, you know. I'm just in this horrible position where I have my backpack down at my feet because I'm not allowed to put it in the overhead bin because I got to save that for all the people who didn't want to pay to have their check bags. And then I can't recline. The guy in front of me reclines. The guy next to me spilling into my seat. I was like, this is... This is no good. This is no good. Flying, and then, it's, it's like, I think Okay, so, I haven't even gotten to my pet peeve yet.

Melissa: 50:40

Oh, okay.

Chris: 50:42

But it's all leading up to, it's all leading up to, why is there not, like a prosumer version of flying? Right? So like, okay, my ticket was 800 bucks round trip, because I booked it pretty late. flight to Chicago. First class, and it was like It was like 4, 000 round trip or something like that, so I didn't, not gonna pay for first class. Then business class or whatever they call it, right? I pass those seats. They, they don't look any different from my seat. You know what I mean? Like they, they look pretty like you pay a pretty hefty premium and they did not look so much nicer for an hour long flight that I was willing to pay the premium. There seems to be no, like, like, Oh, you know, this is, this is the iPhone version of, of flying. You know what I mean? Like people, people happily pay for that iPhone. It's expensive, but it's like a prosumer device. It's, it's like, it's like a, you know, it's a, it's not a entry level 300 Android device. It's, it's, it's a thousand dollar, you know, iPhone device or something like that. There, there's, there seems to be this chasm between economy and first class that is not being appropriately filled. By business class, because I've, I've done the business class and I'm like, this is not worth it. This is, there's not like priority boarding. I don't want to be on the tube. I want to be in this big, beautiful airport.

Melissa: 52:20

Except on international flights. Then business class does

Chris: 52:23

Oh, inter, international flights or even economy is nice on international flights.

Melissa: 52:28

Eh, depends how long your flight is.

Chris: 52:29

Like, well, I will say Virgin, Virgin Australia was a 16 or 17 hour flight

Melissa: 52:35

Oh yeah, I love virgin.

Chris: 52:37

it, but it was amazing. I was like, this is practically first class and we were in economy.

Melissa: 52:41

I give you like so much food, and oh

Chris: 52:44

and it's good food, like for, for an airline and like everybody's super friendly and there's like places to get up and like move around and hang out like you don't have to stay in your seat the whole time. Virgin is amazing. Yeah. So why, why isn't there That kind of an airline for domestic flying. Is it just that they like Americans look at like the 260 United ticket and they see the 300 Virgin ticket and they're like, yeah, I'm not going to spend the extra 40 bucks for a better experience. And they just can't make it work. The prosumer flying airline can't make it work in the States. I don't know. I don't know. There's something weird. There is something weird about the economies of flying that has left this chasm and I can't figure out what it is. It's strange. And, , I'm sure, yeah, I think the only way to answer that is probably some kind of you know, some kind of an economist or a psychologist or something, somebody that explains the human condition that says, no, we don't want a prosumer airline. We, we want these cheap airlines that treat us horribly and make billions of dollars in profits and, and tell us that they have to make the seats that small. Because profit,

Melissa: 54:01

yeah, well I guess it just depends how much the price difference is, you

Chris: 54:04

I guess, unless I think I'm just becoming an old man. I think that's what this truly is. People complain about these things? I don't think they do. I think I'm getting old.

Melissa: 54:14

Well, they don't have, yeah, they wouldn't even be able to pay for the prosumer version, probably, right? I don't know. Well, some of them would, but the ones that probably already can probably already fly in the first class, maybe. But have you seen this, this mock up design that I don't think it's a real thing but someone has proposed that's like the, it's like economy seats, but they're like staggered and like with a upper level and not like an upper level of the plane, but yeah.

Chris: 54:45

have seen them. I have seen

Melissa: 54:47

joke is that like you pay less to sit on the bottom because that's where like, like you're basically behind someone's butt where they're going to be farting.

Chris: 54:54

Well, okay, so maybe I'm thinking of something different because the one I've seen is they stagger the middle seat.

Melissa: 54:59

Oh no,

Chris: 55:00

Yeah, so the middle seat is recessed a little bit. So you have room for your shoulders.

Melissa: 55:05

Oh no, no, this is like staggered by height.

Chris: 55:09

Okay,

Melissa: 55:09

Yeah, so you have more room, but then you're under someone's butt.

Chris: 55:13

But I thought, I thought that actually made a lot of sense to give the middle seat reset a little bit at recess so then they, they can actually, you know, they're not, they're not jammed in between the, the window seat and the aisle seat. I thought that was pretty smart, but I don't know, maybe, maybe in reality it doesn't actually work. Anyway, my whole pet peeve is the economies of flying, for some reason, don't make a prosumer level airline in the United States work. End of story. I think, The crazy thing is... Except for the, plane itself, I love the whole flying experience. I love, like, I love the beautiful airports. I love, chilling out at, like, a cool lounge. And I love planes. I love, like, the, the science of flying. And I love being in the air and looking down and seeing everything. Like, everything about flying, I, I, I really love. I look forward to driving to the airport. I get excited and like, I, I. I love everything about it. It's, it's literally just the level of discomfort because you're, you're crammed in too tight. You're not given any leg room or anything, you know, and, and I think ultimately, like, what's really getting me here is, you know, the, the the world and the, the, the world we live in and the, and the economy that we, we crave after has incentivized all of the decisions to lead to this, right? There's no, there's no incentive to treat your customers more kindly and give them more room unless there's a financial benefit. See what I'm saying?

Melissa: 56:49

yeah,

Chris: 56:51

You know, and, and I think at least at Worthington, the way that we operate is You know, we do consider it important, to consider the fact that a customer is in a jam and we want to help them out and we want to try to do something for them, like to, to get them out of this jam and get these boards built as soon as possible. You know, we don't we don't just say, Hey, what's the profit for me to do that for them?

Melissa: 57:16

yeah, I think we would need someone that has more knowledge about the profit margins of airlines

Chris: 57:21

Yeah, for sure. But this is why I said I think it's almost like more of a philosophical discussion at a certain point, you know?

Melissa: 57:28

yeah,

Chris: 57:29

Anyway. Somebody somebody make a prosumer airline and let me fly it, please. Thank you.

Melissa: 57:34

and we'll promote it on the podcast

Chris: 57:36

see? You're gonna get like a thousand people. Fly it. Thousand people are gonna fly your airline. I mean, come on. Recipe for success right there. And I think the other thing is certain airlines used to be a bit prosumer. I remember 15 years ago, JetBlue was kind of prosumer. It was, it was pretty nice.

Melissa: 57:58

Virgin America too.

Chris: 57:59

Oh, there was?

Melissa: 58:00

yeah.

Chris: 58:02

it was pretty nice.

Melissa: 58:03

And it was pretty nice. Yeah

Chris: 58:04

And I wonder, did it just what happened?

Melissa: 58:07

not sure, I think it got bought by, I could be wrong here, but I want to say, I want to say it got bought by Alaska?

Chris: 58:15

there's not many left in the United States. Like there's like four big airlines, right? It's like United, Delta, Southwest, and American. I think that's about it.

Melissa: 58:24

mm. Well, and then there's all the really horrible budget ones.

Chris: 58:29

Yeah. Yeah. But there's no differentiation between any of 'em. I guess Southwest is a little bit different than

Melissa: 58:35

Yeah, their boarding is different.

Chris: 58:37

boarding's different. Their, their, their staff and their culture is a little bit different. But but you know, you blink it, you know, squint a little bit. You can't tell the difference between Delta, United and American. They're all . They're all the same. Yeah. Anyway. You got a pet peeve about flying? We'd love to hear it. Email us. contact@pickplacepodcast.com. X US

Melissa: 58:59

Oh gosh.

Chris: 59:00

I'm going to let that, I'm just going to post at us, send us a message on X at CircuitHub or at WAssembly and tell a friend and keep the suggestions coming. We do want to answer them all. So despite the lack of answering them, this is an episode that proves we do want to answer

Melissa: 59:16

Yeah. Something I wanted to mention that I was thinking about is if you have a different preferred social media channel, That you like to hang out on let us know so that we can become more active there.

Chris: 59:30

And let us know if you don't want to have us on a social media channel.

Melissa: 59:35

Yeah, I think that's it. Thanks for listening to the PickPlace podcast. If you like what you heard, consider following us in your favorite podcast app, and please leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast from.

Chris: 59:48

Thanks, Melissa.

Melissa: 59:49

Thanks, Chris.