I have a bunch of through hole LEDs to solder this weekend and I was curious if I could use solder paste instead of soldering each lead like normal?
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Yes/no. Yes in that you technically could do that, but unless you’re using a reflow oven or don’t have the dexterity to solder it with normal solder there’s no reason to do that. You still have to run the iron over each connection. Also, you’d have to use a lot of solder paste to make that work, which isn’t really worth it in my opinion.
What you can do if you want to populate all the through holes at once is drop all the through hole components in the top of the PCB, tape over them with blue tape to keep them secure, flip it and then batch solder them all and batch clip the leads. Basically if you can keep yourself from switching tools as much as possible you’ll get it done way faster.
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The tape method works great. Also if you have different height components a block of very soft foam can help hold components in.
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Great point!
Guess I’m sticking with the tape method. Thanks!
There is a discussion on Hackaday this week related to this very topic.
Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exGo1YhS4Rw
Article (entitled: Fail of the Week - How Not to Re-reflow, so that may be a warning about the effacacy of the techinque): https://hackaday.com/2019/10/10/fail-of-the-week-how-not-to-re-reflow/
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