Reviving this thread... I've spent some of the holiday season using hot-air soldering for surface-mount devices, and the results are far superior to hand-soldering. With good solder paste (I'm using ChipQuick 63/37; there are several other brands) and placing small dabs on solder pads with the included syringe. You dont need to use a stencil; you probably will want one if you are doing several builds of the same board AND you are going to mount all components at the same time.
If the PCB has good solder-masking, the solder paste will flow from the masked area towards the pad when heated, so shorts are unlikely to occur unless you used way too much paste. I've also seen some self-centering of SMT parts while the solder is molten, so you dont need to hold the part in-place while soldering as long as the airflow velocity from your hot-air machine is low enough. BTW, I'm using a cheap (40 USD on Amazon) reflow device that holds temperature quite well; adjustable airflow is a MUST-have feature. If you are fearful of doing SMT work because it looks too small, I suggest you give it a try. Find a PCB from a discarded device and test it out yourself. Thru-hole parts should still be soldered with a traditional hand iron. On Saturday, June 13, 2020 at 1:03:48 PM UTC-7 Bill Notfaded wrote: > Metcal 100% I'll never go back again. We use them at work to solder for > space applications under scopes... Well I don't but they do in the > factories. Since they turned me on and I bought a 5k series I'm totally > sold. It's the bomb period! > > Bill > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/2587ced5-a9c2-49c8-9b48-6ac2ecc9eeaan%40googlegroups.com.
