I have some SMD work I need to do, and if I’m going to be entirely honest I don’t trust my heat gun skills – I worry about surrounding components, am never really happy with shielding (as either not enough is protected or it’s an incredible pain in the A when working on 0.5mm resistors all lined up right beside each other)… etc.
Maybe I need to just suck it up and have somebody walk me through best practices for using heat guns for SMD work… but those tweezer irons are pretty great as an alternative! And less time investment from me and certainly from others
Yeah, they certainly aren’t cheap. I’ve found a few off brands for more
reasonable prices, but it’s hard to get myself to trust off-brand stuff for
something as detail oriented as SMD work.
I did consider “chopsticking it” (gotta admit, I love the term!), but it
seems at least one station if not more tend to be taken so I’d feel pretty
bad about tying up two nice irons. And the trust thing comes up with
not-nice irons: I tried that once with my Hakko and your average $15 Radio
Shack firestarter, and trying to match temperatures to any reasonable
degree whatsoever had me pulling my hair out.
(edit: eww, responses from Gmail come out ugly by default. Lesson learned.)
OK, now I’m really going to cop to actually setting foot in the eLab maybe only once a year… Do we have solder paste in there? Yup, I have no idea. I figured I’d give my heat gun another shot for this project, and then I realized my paste is all dried up. Thought we might have some I could use in the 'space, but then again that stuff’s pretty expensive, so…
We have a metcal tweezer, and two pairs of tips. I know because I brought it in, along with a Metcal base, and a desoldering gun. There is a switch for the metcal power supply that selects between any two of those tools. Actually we also have an MX-500 supply that directly switches between two heating elements.
For some reason, the metcals tend to be used less than the (lesser) irons, and keeps getting moved around, so I’m not sure exactly where it is, but all that stuff should be in the electronics room.
I did a similar AVR chip once with the help of @dave. Heavy flux pen, dab of solder on tip, and swipe across. It was shockingly easy, and some people claim easier than thru hole parts.
A small SMD clock crystal with a lead on center bottom was actually the holdup on the PCB I was populating. Not sure how I was supposed to do that without reflow…
PS> I think that’s me asking you if you need the scope. I have this unique condition where I really hate the way my recorded voice sounds. I am sure this condition is rare and very unique
Pre-tin the contacts, flux the sucker out, and then if you can get any part of the pad or lead with the tip, should just reflow. I have tons of arduino ceramic oscs this way. Granted, I have a Hot Air as well now, but I found I can do it faster with an iron in many cases
