News Center Articles The people behind custom soldering tips: inside JBC technical support
At JBC, technical support goes far beyond answering questions. It is a dedicated team of engineers and specialists working directly with customers in the automotive, medical, and aerospace sectors to diagnose problems, propose solutions, and see every project through to completion. Their work ranges from process troubleshooting and application consulting to developing a tip from scratch when the application calls for it.
In electronics manufacturing, a soldering problem rarely announces itself with a clear label. It arrives as a symptom: a joint that does not form correctly, a component that cannot be reached, a cycle time that is too long, or a quality issue that keeps coming back. Finding the root cause takes specialists who understand both the tool and the application.
Once the cause is clear, the solution can take different forms. Sometimes that means adjusting the process, other times recommending a tool better suited to the job, and occasionally developing a custom tip designed for that exact use. But custom development is just one part of a much broader role.
Technical support is often seen as a reactive service customers turn to when things go wrong. At JBC, the role is much broader.
The team works alongside customers at every stage. They start by understanding the problem and their needs, then propose solutions and refine them together until the result is right. When no existing product fits, the outcome is a custom tip tailored to the exact demands of that production process.
JBC Technical Support
The goal is always the same, says José Manuel Suárez, head of technical support at JBC:
"Our objective is to adapt the contact surface and thermal transfer as much as possible to the customer's application, achieving the minimum time and temperature needed to complete the solder joint."
Meeting those goals has a direct impact on production. Shorter cycle times improve throughput, while lower temperatures reduce the risk to sensitive components and help keep quality issues under control. Better thermal transfer extends tip life and brings down costs. And since every application is different, so is every tip designed to address it.
The clearest way to understand what the team delivers is to look at a real project, one that no standard tip could have handled. Some of the most demanding cases involve components with very different thermal masses.
Suárez describes a project that captures this well:
"We were working with components that had very different thermal masses, one with a large contact area and another with a much smaller one. The challenge was designing a tip that could deliver enough heat to the larger piece first without damaging the more sensitive element nearby. On top of that, the geometry had to work within a very specific production setup. Finding the right balance between heat flow, contact surface, and geometry across such different parts is the kind of problem that pushes you."
Striking that balance requires knowing how heat behaves across different materials, how the shape of the tip affects thermal transfer, and how minor changes in design can have a major impact on the joint and the components nearby.
Projects like this are where technical support becomes an engineering partnership between JBC and the customer.
Technical support is also where a company learns what the industry needs next.
No two requests are the same. Each one reveals a gap the standard catalog cannot fill, and each one makes the team more capable than before. As Suárez puts it:
"What I find most exciting is how every new request reveals something different: a unique application, a specific challenge, a problem we have not seen before. It helps us improve, grow, and stay in tune with what is happening in the industry, a sector that moves very fast."
Precision soldering on a densely populated PCB
That link between customer challenges and internal learning reflects how JBC has built its expertise over nearly a century, staying close to the problems that matter most to the people using its tools.
What sets JBC's approach apart is not just technical expertise. It is the commitment to staying with the customer from the first conversation to final delivery.
"That is part of JBC's DNA. Working shoulder to shoulder with every customer to reach the best possible result”, concludes Suárez.
If your production line has a challenge the catalog has not answered yet, that is exactly where this conversation starts.
