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30 SMT Magazine • September 2016 Minimizing scrap and waste from the pro- cess of assembling military and aerospace elec- tronics should always be a top priority for de- sign and production engineers. However, the critical reliability require- ments of these types of assemblies and the risk/ reward proposition of manual or semi-automat- ic rework/repair make the decision to scrap de- fective assemblies easy. When lives, military mission success and millions of dollars of equip- ment value are at stake, reworking a $200 as- sembly with different touch-up fluxes or manu- al soldering with cored wire may create an un- acceptable result when a FEMA is analyzed. So once the decision has been made to scrap a quantity of defective boards that were des- tined for the cockpit of a large volume stealth fighter, there is only one question that needs to be answered: How can the value of the sub- strate and components used to create the defec- tive assembly be recovered without compromis- ing the top secret design of the circuit? Keeping the scrapped materials within the United States is an obvious first principal. Sell- ing the scrap to a broker or dealer could eas- ily result in the scrapped circuit board being shipped to a foreign country for disassembly or disposal. Obviously, this outcome should be by Mitch Holtzer ALPHA ASSEMBLY SOLUTIONS Recycling Substrates and Components in Mil/Aero Assemblies: Secure Metals Recovery ACROSS THE BOARD