hot air desoldering reflow station

[Mars Amp Repair]

Hey folks,
I'm looking into getting a hot air rework workstation primarily for reflowing IC's in keyboards & digital workstations.

I see some now available for very reasonable.

I've also considered the butane rework pencils...they seem very reasonably priced, too.

Any experience with any that you know are good & not an arm & leg? thanx, glen

[Enzo]

oooh, I am interested in this too.

[Mars Amp Repair]

Hey Enzo,
I see this one online for about $100. It has available tips as well as the replacement heater is reasonable, too.
I don't know anything about it but on one site, the feedback from the only respondant was that it broke down in a week & kept breaking down. Chinese made ya know, but Ya never know, tho...g

here's a Weller butane desoldered: Product Details | P2KC Cordless Butane Soldering Iron and Hot Air Tool Kit | Fastenal

And another:

Amazon.com: Blazer SI-100 Excalibur Multi-Purpose Butane Torch and Hot Air Soldering Kit: Industrial & Scientific

Amazon.com: Blazer SI-100 Excalibur Multi-Purpose Butane Torch and Hot Air Soldering Kit: Industrial & Scientific

[defaced]

I've never done hot air rework, but these guys seem to be a good resource of electronics info for electronics geeks who like to have fun. The station they use is 200 bucks.

SparkFun Electronics
and general SMD/hot air
SparkFun Electronics

[loudthud]

I've been using a Hakko 850 (now obsolete) for about 10 years. If it breaks down, work grinds to a halt because the boards my company repairs are about 90% surface mount. It broke down once and cost about $100 and two days to replace heating element and quartz tube. Bought a backup on Ebay. Stainless nozzels very expensive. Unit works well and requires practically zero maintenance.

[Enzo]

Cool.

[Steve Conner]

The place I used to work had an Ao Yue and it was terrible. Our technician hated it and it broke within a week.

If you're going to be using it every day, it might be worth paying the extra for a name brand like JBC or Pace.

[Mars Amp Repair]

here's the site with the hot air rework station that has a coil heater as opposed to the ceramic one. As you can see, the tips & replacedment heater seem pretty reasonable. Still looks a lot like the Chinese one, but again who knows. The heater element is
'out of stock'. Not sure if that tells you anything or not. Still, $100 ain't bad.

The 2nd one on the page is strictly a hot air rework station w/o the soldering iron.

Solder Stations, Desoldering Tools, Soldering Irons

[Mars Amp Repair]

The particular station in the prior post is at least handled by 'MPJA Inc'. There is a site for that MPJA.com. They have other interesting test quips, too. g

[Don Moose]

May I place a vote for a direct-heated unit? A Metcal rig with a tweezer for the 2-pad parts and a set of sized/shaped tips for the SOIC and PLCC parts you run into works REALLY well ... except for BGA parts, for which it does diddly.

Not real cheap, but very, very effective and dead reliable.

[Jazz P Bass]

I use a Weller hot air gun.
Comes with a couple of contour tips.
Has a hi & lo setting.
My only complaint is the fan is a little too forceful.
It helps to have some shim stock to block off were you do not want heat.

[guitician]

Cool, I always wondered what I would have to do to replace a quad flat pack. I'm certainly not going to try doing it with my Weller fine tip.

When you get to the reflow stage, how do you get solder paste onto all those tiny pads?

[Steve Conner]

In the ghetto, we used to replace QFPs by cutting all their legs off with a Dremel cut-off wheel, desoldering the severed legs a few at a time with desoldering braid, and then soldering the new chip on using the old Weller fine tip.

There's a technique for soldering fine-pitch SMTs by hand, that involves tacking the corner pins, then applying lots of liquid flux and rolling a ball of molten solder along the pins with a pretty hot iron. You always cause lots of solder bridges between pins, but the secret is not to panic: just remove them with desoldering braid later.

I've also seen people soldering BGAs with a clothes iron on Youtube, but you can see anything on Youtube. My own attempts at reflowing BGAs in a toaster oven have always ended in disaster.

In real electronics manufacturing, the solder paste is screenprinted onto the board through a stainless steel "solder mask" that's generated from the PCB artwork.

[Jazz P Bass]

Yeah, did you ever get one where the solder paste was like glue?
Can you say "lifted trace"?
Quote guitician:
"When you get to the reflow stage, how do you get solder paste onto all those tiny pads? "
If you use a fine tipped solder iron & you tin the tip with a small amount of solder, by going back over the existing pads, with a smooth stroking motion, you can retin them.
I use my hotair gun to get the pads wet & then place the component.
100 pin microprocessors are loads of fun!

[Mars Amp Repair]

Yeah don,
Would love to use that system. Some of my techs have also used them before. I'll have to look into it again & perhaps just get 1 or 2 to move around the shop as needed.
I need to update my soldering stations, too. As a shop owner...it never ends.

I just won an Instek brand scope on E-Bay for my 4th bench. It is a model GOS-662G 20Mhz $115.00. They sell new for about $300+. It's perfectly adequate for what we do here.

It seems that there is one company that builds the scopes & other test quips for many mfgs. I've heard it is the mother company for Thompson electronics...the same that I also believe makes Tenma quips.

Next I want to get another triple or double dc bench supply with adjustable current limiting. I have a triple supply now that has all that on it. Very useful when you want to substitute a voltage or just figure out what the polarity is on a keyboard without risking blowing it up.

Anyway, thanx for the suggestion...glen