[sdiy] SMT in a toaster oven

[cheater cheater]

I wonder how bigger boards could be done. Maybe a foreman grill...?
Superfluous solder paste could flow down into the container :))
D.

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 23:41, Eric Brombaugh <ebrombaugh1 at cox.net> wrote:
> On 02/26/2010 03:17 PM, mark verbos wrote:
>>
>> I just tried using a small convection toaster oven to reflow some SMT
>> parts.
>>
>> Woah! It work perfectly.
>>
>> This circuit board is about 6" x 8" and FILLED with discrete parts.
>> Soldering it by hand takes me about 20 hours of labor and looks like
>> shit.
>
> How many parts are on that board? I find that hand soldering
> SMT with tweezers & a fine tip is slightly faster than through-hole (less
> board flipping, no clipping), but I typically don't have more than 50-60
> parts on a board. If it's taking you 20 hours to solder then you must have
> some serious number of parts.
>
>> I stenciled solder paste on it and placed all the parts by hand in
>> about an hour and a half, reflowed it in 90 seconds. It looks like a
>> machine did it.
>
> The neat thing about reflow is that surface tension on the solder pulls the
> parts into almost exact alignment, and the fillets/meniscuses (meniscii?)
> are gorgeous.
>
>> Do all of you SMT guys do this?
>
> I've used a hot plate to reflow parts with leads that I can't reach with an
> iron (SD card slot with pins underneath, chip-scale packages,  etc). This
> works nicely, but generally all other SMT stuff is done by hand. The stencil
> cost is mainly what keeps me away from this, particularly since I'm only
> doing onesy-twosy quantities for personal use.
>
> Eric
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