SMTAI 2026 - Mike Young

From The D-Code Podcast · 20:58

Show by The D-Code

Walk onto almost any spotless SMT floor in the country, walk past the shiny pick-and-place lines, and open up the wave solder machine. Nine times out of ten, the only clean thing inside that cabinet is the molten wave itself right before it collapses into a crust of dross. Why? Because most soldering equipment is miserable to clean. And on a busy production floor, if a machine fights you on maintenance, maintenance does not get done. Mike Young (CEO and General Manager of SASinno Americas) started his career at Electrovert back in the early '90s and jokes that he is one of maybe three people in the entire industry who genuinely loves wave solder. Better yet, he spent years in the field as a manufacturer's rep listening to the daily moans and groans of process engineers. Now he builds machines around fixing the exact headaches engineers complain about. When Mike sat down with Elias Malfavon Jr., Sean Kincaid, and Daniel Stanphill at the SMTA International 2026 booth, we got into the practical, quality-of-life details you rarely think about when signing a PO, but feel every single week on the floor: • Designing wave cabinets where every door, preheater plate, and fluxer pulls straight out, plus automatic end-of-shift flux purging so nozzles do not crust up overnight • Current-draw sensors on heaters that warn you weeks before an element dies (beating Sean's traditional "hold your hand over the preheater to see if it burns" test) • Putting heaters at the very base of selective electromagnetic pumps so operators can actually shut the wave off at lunch instead of oxidizing solder and eating up nozzles just to keep the cylinder from sludging up • How one solid XYZ gantry platform took them from selective soldering into conformal coating and high-speed PCB laser marking

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