Miss Prints

Surface wiping will not clean your board. Look under a scope and you will see paste in the vias.

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Some use small cleaners but I have always used the stencil washer. Most stencil washers come with a basket of some kind of board holder (or via holder - depending on how technical you want to get). Buying a stencil cleaner is hard to justify just for miss prints, thus the reason some people buy the ultra-sonic bench model cleaners. Do your homework and see. Most vendors will clean a sample board for you.

I have seen that wiping is a killer and no washer will get all the paste off after wiping. If you simply take the miss printed board and clean it without wiping, you get better results. Granted I have not tried wiping and letting a board sit in a cleaner for days on end. I have always worked in paces that want a miss printed board cleaned in under 15 minutes - thus the reason I use a stencil cleaner. Have always used ISO to clean the stencils and boards (and vias) with also. If your flux medium is alcohol based, it makes sense to do so. This doesn't mean you cannot use other chemistries. Just what I choose to use. And yes I know ISO is flammable and you "cannot use it in a sten-sa-mable machine" blah blah blah.... but there are companies that make all pneumatic machines so there is no electronics to start a fire.

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