Toaster oven soldering
2006-07-21 by Leon Heller
I thought I'd try the cheap toaster oven I bought some months ago. I had a couple of spare PCBs (solder mask and HASL tinning) for my LPC2106 Philips ARM system (48 pin 0.5 mm lead pitch) so I put a thin strip of solder paste along each row of pads, positioned the chip on top, getting it as square as possible, and put the PCB in the oven. I set it for maximum heat (both top and bottom elements) and left it until I saw the solder start to flow. I then switched it off and opened the door. About half the pins looked very good, there were blobs of solder on the others where the paste had been applied too thickly. Cleaning the blobs up with desolder braid and then using a fine-tip on my soldering iron with plenty of gel flux to remove the remaining small bridges didn't take very long. The chip has centred itself properly on the pads via surface tension, and it looks quite neat. I managed to lift one pad with the desoldering braid but the pin isn't connected so it doesn't matter. If I can apply a consistent thin line of solder paste with the syringe, I should be able to get very good results. Some practise will probably help or I might be able to get a smaller nozzle. Leon -- Leon Heller, G1HSM leon.heller@... http://www.geocities.com/leon_heller