geekhack
geekhack Projects => Making Stuff Together! => Topic started by: pineapple on Sun, 01 January 2017, 16:23:26
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A general soldering thread plus a question of my own.
How do you guys solder your SMT components?
Do you use a toaster oven as a reflow oven? or do you use a soldering iron, some flux and solder?
I personally want to read some insight before I tackle my first attempt at soldering SMT components. I've only done some soldering
with through-hole components on an arduino shield and on a GPIO male header on a raspberry pi zero.
Anyways, I'm anticipating some great responses!
P.S. Happy New Year!
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sorry, wrong board. My bad
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I solder surface mount using a normal iron+station. What I do is place a little bit of solder on one of the pads, and then reheat it and place the component on. Ill then solder the other pad, and reflow the first pad last. It seems to work pretty well, but there may be a better way of doing it.
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Depends. If it's a one-off prototype/project/repair, I'll hand solder it. More than that, especially if it's dual sided, I typically can't be bothered and just send it off to a fab :D
Hand soldering methods vary depending on components. HASL finished boarts are a bit easier to work with as you can tack down parts before applying solder, unlike ENIG. For very small passives like 0402, I use 0.4mm tipped MFR-H4-TW tweezers. Leaded ICs with small pitch of 0.5mm or thereabouts I use a special concave Pace tip for drag soldering. QFNs and similar I pretin the pads then use hot air. No clean flux is always required, and often the more the better. I like NC-559-V2-TF (http://www.ebay.com/itm/252340246160) as long as one is careful to get the genuine article.
Technique does matter more than gear, but having quality gear helps a lot and makes the process easier and less error prone.
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sorry, wrong board. My bad
No worries. I've moved it to the Making Stuff Together! sub-forum (https://geekhack.org/index.php?board=117.0).
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sorry, wrong board. My bad
No worries. I've moved it to the Making Stuff Together! sub-forum (https://geekhack.org/index.php?board=117.0).
Thank you so much. Happy New Year!
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Hot air for small parts. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z1B_DbW-C0)
Iron for bigger parts with pins on sides. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uiroWBkdFY)