Holy moly. This was a rough day. Preceded by 16 hours of hands-on soldering training, 8 more hours of classroom instruction and four tests later, I’m certified to the IPC J-STD-001H (Class 3 for medical, military and aerospace electronics).
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Dude. 
. Those kinds of things are indeed exhausting.
My soft soldering experience is mostly limited to wiring up electric guitars. Can’t say I’m that good.
I have a ton of experience with hard/silver soldering. I can do that in my sleep.
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I don’t have a professional soldering station, but have a variety of soldering irons of different wattages. I’ve mostly used them for fixing broken solder joints or replacing rechargeable batteries that are soldered into place. It’s so useful having this know-how. Not as hard as it looks, once you learn enough.
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There are industry standards for joints now! What a time to be alive!
Jokes aside, congratulations on your certification! I worked on some Aerospace projects and the soldering requirements are very strict to say the least. We also had to deal with the transition to lead free solder, which was a lot of fun (not).
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Is it that the lead provides easier manipulation of the solder, so without it the soldering job is more difficult?
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Patrick, was this a skill improvement class encouraged (and paid for) by your employer? Or did you seek this out on your own? What kinds of tasks are you hoping to do for this new certification?
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Hey Gary. I am a manager in Clinical Engineering for a 6 hospital healthcare system. We support and maintain all the (biomedical) electronic equipment and imaging devices used to treat our patients.
We also have a for-profit repair depot that repairs medical devices for hospitals all over the country.
The repair depot is ISO13485 certified (international quality standard for medical device manufacturers). I am the Quality and performance improvement manager and perform our internal audits, and many other things.
This training is part of a mandatory quality improvement program I have initiated for all of our electronics technicians. I took the course because although I rarely repair medical equipment these days, I do audit warranty claims that meet certain criteria. But more importantly, I don’t ask my associates to do things that I won’t do myself.
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Hey Patrick, impressive! I imagine biomedical equipment is such a high factor component to the healthcare system. The demand for perfectly working equipment is so essential, not only to help doctors give the best care, but also, to avoid any litigious risks that might arise from failure of equipment. Competent and thorough QA is mandatory. And while entrusting a properly rated and competent 3rd party to repair & maintenance is essential, it’s smart to be thoroughly prepared to measure and test the quality of the work performed. Usually managers end up distanced from hands-on, so it must feel good to keep yourself fluent in the hands-on work. Congrats on completion of that arduous course!
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Patrick just don’t end up like Bernard Goetz ok?
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