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Soldering with a Toaster Oven
nullset sent in a link to the Seattle Robotics Society about soldering in an unconventional way. Instead of the traditional soldering iron, Kenneth Maxon has successfully used a toaster oven to solder surface mount parts. The "magic ingredient" that facilitates this is a water-soluble solder paste. I wish I'd thought of this back when I had to solder one of those *ahem* aftermarket accessories to my playstation, since the whole process looks easier than trying to hold a soldering iron steady.
What isnt a toaster good for?
(I regretfully ask)
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
First we had solid solder, cool. Then we had rosin-core solder for electronics, cooler. Then we had tabs of solder that could be melted with a lighter, lame. Now we have a toaster that can be used to solder, which is theoreticaly cool but realistically lame.
Wouldn't this paste have a higher resistance than the solder we know and love? Couln't a soldering iron be used to heat it with greater efficiency? Does it have any use outside of SMD?
Maybe I'm just weird, but I won't part with my soldering iron any time soon. SMD may be cool, but it doesn't have the "cobbled togethor" look of a traditionally etched and soldered circuit.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Why burn ants when you can put that magnifying glass to good use soldering circuits together in the summer sun? ;-)
Seriously though, wouldn't it be cool if someone modified a laser-pen (or appropriately set up fibre-optic light source) to serve as a soldering iron?
No more fumbling with hot-metal iron pens. Shutter the light and it's cold!
--The more you know, the less you know.
Yes, I agree. When I first came to my current day job back in about '98, they had a little toaster oven they used for the completion of SMT boards. I think now they just send the boards out to be produced and populated elsewhere (it's cheaper that way once you reach a certain point) but they were most definitely doing it for a long while before that.
:) These are the chips (like embedded PPC) that just have a big matrix of solder balls on the bottom which are soldered to the board.
How do you guys think Ball Grid Array packages are mounted on a board?
Which reminds me of this humorous episode where a guy pulled down the oven from the shelf and cooked his lunch in it, not knowing what it was... and when we learned what had happened we all just about shit a brick. He didn't get lead poisoning or anything though.
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You've got two things going for you when you burn paper with a magnifying glass that you don't have while heating a chip lead. Paper combusts spontaniously, and paper is a poor conductor of heat compared to copper, tin, and lead. This means that you can heat a tiny spot on a piece of paper to over 400F more easily than a spot of copper because the energy you're putting into the paper isn't being carried away so fast, and that you only have to set a tiny spot of paper on fire for the whole sheet to burn. My guess would be that your magnifying glass wouldn't be able to heat a chip lead up that much because the heat would get carried elsewhere almost as quickly as you were putting it in, and even if it didn't, you'd have to pump a lot more heat into the chip lead since it's got to be completely heated to get the job done instead of having just a tiny spot heated.
I was pretty disappointed. There were tons of solder bridges (where the solder connects two pins together), some pins that didn't stick reliably, etc. I wound up spending as much effor cleaning up as I would have doing it by hand in the first place. If I was going to try it again, I might make a solder mask to apply the paste only on the pads, instead of running a thin line across the pads as they recommended.
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