Kester Solder offers a wide variety of soldering products. So wide, at times, that it can be difficult to determine what the key differences between some of them are. 24-7068-7601 and 24-7068-7618 are two Kester formulations that look parametrically identical in DigiKey’s website. Is there a significant difference between these two?
There is. Diving into this series on the supplier’s web page, you can see that the 7601 is a slightly narrower wire, core size 58, with a slightly lower flux percentage of 2.2%. 7618 is a core size 66 part with 3.3% flux instead. These differences are subtle and may not impact your project if you are doing general ‘good enough’ rework or prototyping, but they’re worth keeping in mind when eliminating inefficiencies in larger production runs.