Tribute to Eddy van den Wijngaerd

2 September 2009 News

July saw the tragic passing of Eddy van den Wijngaerd, a highly respected member of the South African electronics community and the author of a long series of articles published in Dataweek. He succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of 62.

Eddy was an electronics engineer with 38 years of experience in electronics, micro-electronics, quality assurance and process engineering. He was a long-time IPC certified trainer and trained a large number of PCB assembly and soldering personnel working in many large South African electronics companies and contract manufacturers. Anybody who was trained by Eddy or who has read his articles will know the passion with which he espoused the demise of the mythical ‘dry joint’.

Those who knew Eddy personally will remember him for his sense of humour. He was born in Belgium in 1946 where he grew up and finished his studies. He immigrated to South Africa in 1969 where he started his first job at what was then the Post Office, where he was part of the group who developed the pay phone. He then worked at the University of Pretoria as an electronics engineer and trained students.

In 1980 he moved to Natal where he worked at Barlows and was manager of HME for a few years. In 1987 he moved to Cape Town and worked for Plessey and later Tellumat. He started training students after he had to go on early retirement because of retrenchments at the time. After spending some time at home, he decided to start training companies in soldering. He trained from home and enjoyed every moment of it. For Eddy, electronics was a job as well as a hobby.

Eddy is survived by his wife Annatjie and children Richard, Jacques and Marietjie.

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