decline of quality

[dougbrown]

Just a short rant about the quality of radio shack products and items in general.
I know that we have more than one computer type techie here and a few Ham guys as well. I just wanted to rant a bit about some "desoldering braid" I recently purchased from radio shack. This stuff is crap. I works about as well as a square wheel. In the past I've always used genuine Solder Wick and had very good results. But this stuff cant pull up anything:rant: no matter how hot I get it. How hard can it be to make a decent product? I see that it was made in Taiwan like everything else these days.

 

[Cadsulfide]

Go with Jameco, Digikey, MCM, Newark, Hamiliton-Avnet, etc. Once they (RS) started reselling pizza dishes 15+ yrs ago, they forgot about the hobbyist. Tandy has been known for sub par products for a long time.

 

[Anole]

good old days:

They may be using water-soluble flux.
The entire soldering industry has changed from when I was a boy.
Crap fluxes, and crap de-fluxers; but I guess it saves the environment.
Just doesn't work well at home.

We used to use braid reclaimed from coax.
Get some liquid rosin and put on your braid.
It'll work fine. - :up

Me? I'm sittin' on a 5 gallon can of the -real- defluxer!
Guaranteed to cause cancer in mice! -

 

[Blindowl1234]

Yeah I've still got some solder with lead in it. The so called enviromentally friendly stuff ain't all it's cracked up to be...Blind