SMD Soldering Practice Boards

[savril]

Xrunner, I am using the same tip, so my choice is good.  Miguelvp, I use MG Chemicals liquid flux through a syringe for control.  I do use a PanaVice to secure the board.  I go flux and tin 1 pad, solder that, solder the opposite pin and then go back and solder the rest.  I also use ipa for cleaning.  Maybe, X's board holder is more suitable as it sits flat on the work surface.  I will have to look into that.  I know there was a post on a new one on the market, I will have to go find it.

PanaVice doesn't seem a great choice for SMD to me. I use a board holder at table level, it permit to rest you arm on the table which is better to get a steady hand. You should try to solder on you table without holder (you don't apply much pressure with SMD so that sould do it).

[GreyWoolfe]

Savril, I am learning smd in the Panavise is not the best.  All my soldering has been through hole.  I am probably going to treat myself to a stickvise as it seems that whenever I try to solder anything not being held in place, it moves on me, even on my rubber ESD mat.  I will keep playing with cheap smd kits until I am comfortable.  I am hopefully going to upgrade my soldering iron this year to something like the Thermaltronics TMT-2000 to get a shorter tip to hand distance for better control.  I love my Hakko 936, but it feels a bit awkward and bulky to solder small smd components.

[Canobi]

I just finished making a reflow hotplate and was considering getting some of those practice boards to test it with (well I say finished, I still need to wrap it and box the main section but it's working) .

I had a peak in the PCB scrap bin at work today and hit the jackpot. I found rucks of these unpopulated AC drive control boards which should prove to be quite good in learning how to solder in tightly packed areas too

[xrunner]

Been busy but made some progress on the little audio range FFT board. Don't have all the LEDs on yet but took a break to see if it was responding to an input - it was. The blurb about it on the seller's page didn't mention what frequency bins it uses, so was using my generator to manually scan it a bit. Looks like the first three bins (first three LED columns on the left) cover up to about 4 kHz.

[nanofrog]

Savril, I am learning smd in the Panavise is not the best.  All my soldering has been through hole.  I am probably going to treat myself to a stickvise as it seems that whenever I try to solder anything not being held in place, it moves on me, even on my rubber ESD mat.  I will keep playing with cheap smd kits until I am comfortable.  I am hopefully going to upgrade my soldering iron this year to something like the Thermaltronics TMT-2000 to get a shorter tip to hand distance for better control.  I love my Hakko 936, but it feels a bit awkward and bulky to solder small smd components.

Assuming there will only be parts on one side, why not lay it directly on your ESD mat?
Should keep it from skittering around IME.

[ale500]

@Canobi: That "hot plate reflow" thingy looks extremely interesting !. Could you please post a couple more photos of it ? And some details ? Thanks a lot !

[Canobi]

@Canobi: That "hot plate reflow" thingy looks extremely interesting !. Could you please post a couple more photos of it ? And some details ? Thanks a lot !

Sorry for the late reply, been a bit busy with another project.

The only other pic I have of it is an early WIP (see attached) but I will take some more for you.

The base was a repurposed hi-fi chassis which I'd stripped clean for parts after it stopped working (iowa twin cassette IIRC). The heating element was given to me by the head engineer at work. We had this jig which heated large power modules for AC inverter drives before they went up the solder bath. That particular line of drive was phased out and the jig was just kicking around for ages. After making enquiries as to its fate and explaining why I was interested in it the head engineer let me take it

The temp control came from ebey and was originally for an electric cooker hob. Being as the element is AC it seemed an appropriate, if not exactly elegant solution to some form of control rather than just on or off.

The hex pillars are also from work. At the time of building there was a plethora of different lengths to choos from so was able to play with the hight to find an optimum.

The plate itself is a heat sink from another line of AC inverter drives.

It also has an insulated armoured power lead going from unit to plug but I haven't yet got round to casing the main body.

[technix]

My recent hand-soldering: AVR Inspro-512 board. EAGLE's default footprint for resistor networks are uncomfortable to solder, and the transistor array is, well, almost like crazy.