First, thank you Mark -- your email answered a *lot* of
questions for me.

On a related note, I happened to be browsing around in
the bookstore in the train station on my way into work
this morning, and noticed that the cover of the Summer
1998 Communications Quarterly magzine had a teaser
along the lines of "make your own hot-air soldering
station". On (I think it was) page 96, there is a short
article which describes the author's sucess in modifying
a basic Weller station to do hot air soldering. He had a
EC1201A handpiece, with I'm not sure what base. He used
a Pace hot-air tip, modified to mount into the Weller
handpiece. He also drilled out an air port in the side of
the handpiece and hooked it up with a nylon airhose driven
by a $20 aquarium pump.

I didn't particularly feel like paying the $10 for
the magazine, so I don't have a copy of the story. If
you are interested and can't find a copy of the
magazine (it does not appear to have a website, but
is published by CQ Magazine, which has a website at
http://members.aol.com/cqmagazine/), I'll try to find
out more.

--Bob

On Mon, Nov 30, 1998 at 10:11:18PM -0800, Mark G. Forbes wrote:
> [Harold commented...]
>
> I just hand-solder SMT's with an iron. It's not really that hard; get
> a head-mounted magnifier and a Metcal iron with the 600 degree 1/64" tip.
> You also want to use an RMA flux solder (Kester "44" rosin works best,
> Multicore is awful) in the finest gauge you can get. I use the 63/37 alloy,
> in a .010 diameter. A dab of RMA rosin flux in an insulin syringe also
> helps a lot. Using this setup I've soldered my prototype runs (a dozen
> or so boards sometimes) with parts as dense as 208-pin QFP's on 20 mil
> centers. It's not really that tough, once you get the hang of it.
>
> If you go with the oven approach, you'll still need the hand-work equipment,
> since you'll be chasing down bridges on your QFPs. If it's just SO and
> PLCC packages, you'll be fine, but watch out for bad joints on PLCCs; they'll
> tend to flow out and fail to wick up the leg. I try to avoid them for
> that reason when I'm designing a board and have a choice.

--
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Bob Drzyzgula                             It's not a problem
bob@drzyzgula.org                until something bad happens
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