Apex 2026 - Ethan Shipp

Think about the last time you had a weird question at work. Did you type keywords into Google and click through ten blue links, or did you just ask ChatGPT or Claude? Most people in our industry are already treating AI tools like a smarter search engine. Which brings up a problem most manufacturing companies have not thought about yet: when an engineer asks an AI tool who solves a specific problem, does your shop show up in the answer, or do your competitors? At SMTA International 2026, Francesca Lehtomaa (founder of Lehtomaa Group) sat down with Elias Malfavon Jr., Sean Kincaid, and Daniel Stanphill to talk about Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), targeted LinkedIn strategy, and taking the leap into business ownership after 17 years at one company. We talked through: • What GEO actually means for B2B manufacturing companies trying to get cited where buyers are searching today • Why posting what genuinely interests you beats polished corporate copy every time • Getting the next generation onto the production floor through EMAC and the Bright Manufacturing Challenge • Why Daniel and Sean agree you could identify water-soluble solder paste blindfolded from across the room (and why Elias got called "Unc" on the mic)

Every winter, the same mystery plays out on SMT floors across the country. A board that printed great in September goes back on the line in December. Same paste, same squeegee parameters, same board support, same stencil. Suddenly the paste stops rolling right, hangs up inside the apertures, and somebody picks up the phone to tell the stencil guy his stencil "stopped working." Down at the pick-and-place, static on the cover tape starts turning 0201 LEDs into jumping beans, flipping parts upside down in the pocket before the nozzle even gets there. Nothing broke on the machines. The building heat kicked on and your shop humidity tanked to 12%. At SMTA International 2026, Ethan Shipp from Ikeuchi USA ("the Dry Fog engineers") joined Elias Malfavon Jr., Sean Kincaid, and Daniel Stanphill at The D-Code booth to talk about one of the most overlooked variables in electronics assembly: relative humidity. We got into: • How atomizing water down to 7.5-micron droplets creates a "dry fog" that bounces right off surfaces (you can hold an open laptop three feet from the nozzle and pull it away bone dry) • Why Sean mounted his AKIMist "Green Egg" right next to his pick-and-place and watched his 0201 feeder static headaches vanish • The counterintuitive reason low winter humidity actually makes many air-cured conformal coatings and adhesives take longer to dry, even when your thermostat stays at 68 degrees • Building localized microclimates over specific SMT lines in high-ceiling warehouses without plumbing the whole building (plus the unofficial winter bonus of fewer shop-floor sick days)

"This is the first time we brought equipment into the facility that not one person complained about." Anyone who manages an electronics assembly floor knows how rare that sentence is. That's what Gary Bailes (Daniel's Boss) had to say about ABW's PARMI inspection suite. Juan Arango (Head of Sales and Business Development at PARMI USA) joined Elias Malfavon Jr., Sean Kincaid, and Daniel Stanphill at SMTA International 2026 to talk shop on 3D laser inspection, eliminating tall-component shadowing, getting full-board FOD detection without a cycle-time hit, and cutting AOI programming from half a shift down to under 45 minutes. Plus, Juan owns up to a myth he used to tell customers about red solder mask boards before he joined PARMI, and Sean shares how a demo scan caught a shorted resistor under a tall connector that his own AOI passed.

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  

If you are running an inline cleaner and measuring your chemical costs by how often you dump the tank, you are looking at the wrong number. Rich Burke from KYZEN joined The D-Code booth at SMTA International 2026 to lay down the real math: Dumping an 80-gallon tank monthly burns about 2.5 drums of chemistry a year. Stretching that bath dump saves you maybe one drum. Meanwhile, poor exhaust balance and fixture drag-out can quietly vent and spill 42 drums of chemistry a year right out of your building. Rich sat down with Elias Malfavon Jr., Sean Kincaid, and Daniel Stanphill to talk about bath life myths, enhanced pH buffering, defluxing under bottom-terminated components, and what real chemical process control looks like on an active production line.

In our industry, people throw around the term "High Reliability" like it’s just a box to check on an IPC audit sheet. Then you hear Doug Pauls tell the story of the M1A2 Abrams battle tank. On our latest SMTAI 2026 episode of The D-Code Podcast, we sat down with Doug Pauls (IPC Hall of Fame, former cleaning & coating lead at Rockwell Collins, and founder of It Depends Electronics). Doug told us about giving a talk showing an Abrams tank, and then showing a picture of his son, Captain David Pauls, who was commanding those exact tanks in the US Army. That tank relied on the JTIDS communications system to tell commanders who is friendly and who is enemy on the battlefield. That exact JTIDS unit was being assembled and conformally coated in the building right next to Doug’s desk. When Doug got back from that trip, he went straight to the coating line and made what he calls "a serious pest of myself." An operator looked at him and said: "Doug, you’ve always cared about quality, but you’ve never been a pain in the ass like this." Doug replied: "My son’s life depends on how well you do that coating job." Coating defects plummeted the next week. That is what high-reliability actually means. We also get into inline vs. batch washers (why Doug picks inline hands down), Sean’s 14-hour marathon dialing in Humiseal spray keep-outs, and why IPC’s current design guidelines for conformal coating are "abysmal."  

"If you're doing a trial by fire, Chrys Shea doesn't just run the trial. She invents the fire." Our SMTAI 2026 floor interview with Chrys Shea (Shea Engineering) is officially out on The D-Code Podcast. Chrys just dropped the next evolution of her industry test board—stripping out the 1206s and 0603s and replacing them with 600 bottom-terminated micro-LEDs, "Tombstone Alley" 01005s, and D-Paks with tiny T-Rex legs. We talk: • Why the board is 100% Made in America (designed in RI, laid out in FL, fabbed in MI, stencils in SoCal) • The nightmare of component metallization changing from reel to reel • Why every OEM looking for a new CEM should make this board their standard entrance exam

"People make stuff. I break stuff. That's the fun part." Our first episode from the SMTAI 2026 show floor is live, featuring Anna Lifton, failure analysis veteran at MacDermid Alpha Electronics Solutions and newly elected SMTA Global Board Director. We pressed Anna on the Low-Silver (Low-Ag) debate: is it a legitimate engineering play, or just everyone trying to shave BOM cost after silver prices skyrocketed? The answer comes down to physics: • Better for drop shock and vibration? Yes. • Better for extreme thermal cycling? Absolutely not. Catch the breakdown, plus talk on thixotropes, formic acid reflow, and why solder paste behavior is never as simple as SAC305.  

Thank you Dr. Adam Klett of KYZEN Corporation! This was a highly engaging conversation, as always. We appreciate each time we get to speak with you and the knowledge and insight you share. Since the last time we had a chance to listen to Dr. Adam present, we've been brushing up. Learning. And waiting. Waiting to ask about flux. Flux selection, flux activity, flux impacts on cleaning, flux impacts on long-term reliability... We also had the chance to go deep into process concepts and best practices of cleaning. Bath life health, measuring vs monitoring, batch vs semi-batch vs in-line cleaning, even SIR testing and upcoming advancements in faster methods of process monitoring.

Dr. Elliot, thanks for joining us! What a fun and stimulating conversation. How does one get into becoming a Subject Matter Expert on Cleaning at a National Lab? The traditional way, by studying frogs and ladybugs of course! Dr. Elliot takes us on a brief tour of his academic career, some highlights of projects he's worked on, and shares a lot of insight about preparing for and presenting your knowledge for others.