Advice for tape drive repair / maintenance

Tony Duell wrote: At which point I have a device assembled with lead-free solder, soldered at too low a temperature, so it gets dry joints within a few months. With plastic mechanical parts made from the cheapest plastic imaginable that make a freebie toy look solid. I'd be lucky if that $89 machine lasted for a couple of weeks after the warrenty period... Now guess which I am going to do... -tony --------------------------------------- Oh so cynical for such a young man! I work with lead free solder every day. And WD builds tens of millions of drives with it every quarter. All without "dry joints within a few months". So why do you assume that good engineers wouldn't change the temperature of the soldering machines? Processes change constantly. And every major producer of PCBs has had more than 5 years to move to lead free environment. That was not a difficult change for competent manufacturing engineers to make. Yet, I think this is the third or fourth time you've brought this up. You must have had a bad experience someplace and are judging the technology by that experience. I know a lot of hobbyists, as well as lab technicians, were annoyed at having to buy new soldering equipment for higher temperature boards. But the world has moved on. Lead free soldering is as good and in many cases better than lead based soldering. On the data from more than 100 million lead free PCBs, I can attest dry solder joints are not a problem. As for the cheapest plastic imaginable, I just don't see that in the marketplace. My current assignment is working with DVRs, STBs and TVs using disk drives. So I always have a couple of dozen units torn down on my bench. What I see are vendors that have had 20+ years to refine their design, their processes and their materials. I see components and systems that have an order (or orders) of magnitude better reliability than the products of 20 years ago. This "everything old is good, everything new is crap" is not verified by the data from the industry world wide. Some things do improve with time. Especially in a cut throat competitive industry where warranty costs from poor products will put you out of business in weeks. Customers (and in the US, laws) demand reliable products. Companies don't survive if they make consumer products that wear out in "a year and day". (Anybody here remember that poem?) Tony, you have your preferences and choices and more power to you. But if you did a study of current state of the art electronics, you would find it to be far superior to that of 20 years ago. Even if it won't provide a maintenance manual. Billy