Hi Bill!
Justin hit the nail on the head with his advice. One other thing I'd add too is that if your volume and such points to using cartridges, I found that sometimes operators can get a little wasteful. I worked for a memory company where we'd use around 10,000 grams a day.
When setting up, the operators would look around for a solderpaste gun (we used those chaulking gun thing-a-ma-jigs to dispense it...) and if he didn't see one that was almost full, he'd go get another full cartridge. That was good as far as making sure that the paste was always fresh, but we'd wind-up with all these partial filled cartridges around...so look out for that.
About those mixer "thingies", it's been quite a while ago, but at another company I worked at, someone had bought one of those "Hot dog roller" mixers where you would put the jar in between two rollers and it would slowly spin the jar thus mixing the paste.
Well, we used Kester paste at the time and the jars used to be kinda' mushroom shaped. I found out that if you put the jars on the rollers the wrong way, the mixer thingie would unscrew the tops of the jars for ya! Not only did it mix the paste, but unscrewed the jars too! The fact that you had to scoop the paste off of whatever the mixer was sitting on, and off of the rollers is besides the point...(GRIN)
-Steve Gregory-
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