hot plate soldering

2 Articles

Tools Of The Trade – Reflow

June 2, 2016 by 40 Comments

In our previous issues in this series on making circuit boards, we covered placing solder paste and placing components. Now it’s time to bake our cake!

There are a variety of methods for reflowing a circuit board, but they all rely on a single principle: heat up the solder paste (a mixture of flux and solder) until the flux burns off and the solder becomes liquid, and then cool it down. Accomplishing this once or twice is easy; once you’ve played with a hot plate you’ll swear off through hole. Scaling it up and doing it repeatedly with high yield is extremely challenging, though. Continue reading “Tools Of The Trade – Reflow” →

SMD Soldering On… Hot Sand?

February 15, 2014 by 26 Comments

Need to do some SMD soldering? No tools? No problem! Here’s a creative method that could be a handy tool to add to your belt: SMD soldering using hot sand.

[Oliver Krohn] recently released this little video demonstrating how to perform re-flow soldering using hot sand. He’s using a bunsen burner to heat up a ceramic pot of sand to use as a kind of hot plate. It seems to work pretty well, and it’s a very unique way of doing it — if you wanted to get a bit more technical, you could also throw a temperature probe in the sand to get a much finer heat control!

Of course there are lots of other ways of doing re-flow soldering, like using a re-purposed toaster oven, frying up some circuits on a skillet after you’ve had your bacon, or if you want to be fancy, you could even build your own toolkit for it!

Anyway, stick around for the epic video of SMD soldering on hot sand.

Continue reading “SMD Soldering On… Hot Sand?” →