PCB Reflow Soldering

Good news!

This site is slowly getting archived in favor of our new wider-community effort at Traquito.

Head over to our new site at Traquito to check out the $14 WSPR tracker, realtime maps/graphs, and other great resources!

We've found that using reflow soldering has massively improved the experience of assembling PCBs.

This page has some images of the process of performing the setup and reflow using Doug's reflow toaster.  Mark uses a hot plate.

For photos of the reflow toaster itself see (here).

Stencil on the solder paste to the bare PCB.

Here is the bare PCB after solder paste was stenciled on.

Even very fine pitch pins are covered well thanks to the stencil.

Here is the PCB after parts populated but before reflow heated.

Here is a view of a batch of trackers getting heated together.

You can see a thermocouple measuring the internal temperature so the reflow computer can control the temperature.

Here is the PCB post-reflow.

Most PCBs don't require any rework, but sometimes they do.

Regardless of any minor rework necessary, the boards pretty much work first shot, which is much better than when hand-soldering.