SST 1200 - Service and Maintenance; Routine Maintenance and Troubleshooting

5-1
5. Service and Maintenance Information
5.1 Routine Maintenance
Daily:
There are no mechanical, electrical or pneumatic components in the Model 1200
Table-Top system that require maintenance on a daily basis. Daily operations
however do require that an operator maintain system cleanliness, correctly install
the thermocouple into the boat, and be sufficiently observant to recognize when
problems start to develop.
• Cleanliness in vacuum furnace soldering is critical to both producing
sound joints and in assuring fast pump down to low vacuum levels. It is
important to understand that in order to keep a vacuum chamber clean the
lid should remain shut at all times except when actually loading or
removing product. Another source of contamination is directly from
body oils and body lint that comes from touching the interior surfaces of
the chamber and product with bare hands. By training operators to
understand the importance of properly handling product and never
working on or touching inside the process chamber with bare hands, very
little cleaning will be required.
• How often should the chamber be cleaned? Particulate that accumulates
inside the chamber from the graphite tooling and from the product is
basically inert and doesn’t need to be cleaned on a daily basis. Unless
something such as a screw or other foreign object falls into the chamber
and rolls underneath the radiation shield where it could get sucked into
the vacuum inlet, it can be ignored. When it becomes necessary to
replace the heating element, or when the view port becomes coated with
process residue, the chamber should be cleaned. Please refer to Section
5.3, Repairs and Adjustments, to remove the radiation shield and heating
element. Clean the chamber, lid, and sight glass with a suitable solvent
and lint free cloth.
• If the control thermocouple is being inserted directly into the target plate,
inspect and bend as necessary to ensure that it pushes itself completely
into the hole and maintains pressure against the plate without lifting it off
the radiation shield.
• When the furnace is started at the beginning of each shift, check each
control and indicator to be sure that all functions are working correctly.
Any controls that do not respond as expected, or alarms that will not
clear, must be investigated and corrected before operating the furnace.