MG Chemicals 4900P-250G SAC305, Lead Free No Clean Solder Paste, 9 oz Jar

Bought this solder paste directly from Amazon in May 2018. The date code on the syringe is 17-110, which I presume is the 110th day of 2017. If so, this makes the solder paste more than a year old. The shelf life as specified by the manufacturer is 12 months refrigerated and 6 months unrefrigerated. It is unlikely that Amazon has kept this product in a fridge in their warehouse.Dates aside, the paste appears to be partially dried out. I wasn't able to squeeze any paste out from the syringe with the provided nozzle.

Hands down, the best lead-free solder paste I've used.Pros:*Lead free* - The whole reason I'm using itDoesn't produce solder balls. I've used a dozen different lead-free solder pastes, and all of them except this one leave solder beads all around the joints. Some were minor, some were awful. This is the most forgiving paste I've found, and only leaves solder beads when the paste is totally misplaced and off the pad. I'm sure there is a scientific term for this, but I don't know it. I'll just call it amazing.Excellent even when using with a soldering iron. I've used this to fix solder joints down to 0.5mm pin spacing, and it does an amazing job. Allows for far more precision when soldering.Con:Needs a higher temperature soldering iron or soldering station reflow profile. This reduces the window between getting connections that don't fully solder and getting a burnt board out of your reflow oven. This just meant that I had to spend a little more time tweaking the reflow station to get the tempts right. The profile included in their datasheet was spot-on.

It melts at 220C or so. So you don’t need to go higher than 235C. I usually keep it at 235 for 45s

I mixed the paste with leaded paste to make reballing a little easier. The leaded paste will not withstand the heat and the leadfree need high temperature to work.So the mixture gets the job done well that I do not have to worry about the solder melting while in operation and don't have to heat up to destroy the chips while reballing.

This has to be the BEST paste I have ever used for Lead Free paste.I keep it stored in the fridge and it works amazing and with the right temp profile in my reflow oven I get consistent excellent results!!

This stuff is unreal. It's completely changed how I solder (was using separate flux and solder wire). On many applications, I just use this stuff.4 starts because the plunger doesn't lock into place and has the habit of falling out.

After 4 months it's useless. Buy a new one. Works great when it's fresh. Wish it lasted longer

This was my first try with Lead Free Solder Paste. Required a bit more heat to flow but worked great! I will be using this in future projects also!

This solder paste is excellent - needs keeping in the fridge like they all do but does the job. My only criticism is that the nozzle is too wide for chips with really narrow pin spacing as you end up with too much solder paste which leads to getting it under the chip legs and causing short circuits. From years of experience I find that the best way to solder surface mount chips is to put a very thin line of solder paste across the outer ends of the PCB pads only. After finding this nozzle too large but managing to get there I found I already had some finer sample nozzles from EFD! However I see on Amazon the Chip Quick solder paste does have a narrow nozzle but costs twice as much. If you do lots of surface mounting get one of these as well for the nozzle!!

Despite having left the stuff refrigerated and warming it up at room temperature for 3 hours it just doesn't handle like normal solder.It would probably be fine if you are using stencils but I am dabbing the stuff in place with a pin and it's difficult to get it to even stick to the board and the components in turn do not stick so easily to it!It's taken the best part of 20 minutes to place 3 resistors.However, it does redeem itself by melting nice and quickly with my hot air gun set to 220 C.Packaging is lacking information on reflow temperatures which is a shame. Wouldn't be that hard to add since they already have a colour booklet full of safety warnings.

Solder paste works well. Pretty fair tradeoff between tackiness (to keep the component on the pad) and fluidity (to escape whatever application tool you're using and get onto the pad). Only problem: no needle included! Had to drill a hole through the end cap and use that for dispensing.

Didn't get to use it as, although I thoroughly cleaned the solder pads for the board connector, it would not stick to the pads so I had to clean it off which resulted in loads of small solder balls distributed all over the board so not wanting to risk a short circuit I had to clean the whole board. Don't think I'll be using this again any time soon.

This solder paste just won't stick to the PCB. I also tried to use it with a stencil, but results are horrible - It will most likely go anywhere but the place where it supposed to go. Avoid!