The entire purpose of the companies we all work for is to make a profit. If you give your "trade secrets" (read: how things actually work) to others, they will be able to compete and reduce your profits. On the other hand, if you don't share trade secrets, technology fails to advance and others who are sharing will get ahead of you. The us patent system was designed to address this issue by requiring that people share but allowing for "credit where credit is due" when appropriate. It doesn't work but it was a good try. Anyway, if it wasn't for the PICLIST and other "back door" means of engineers to talk freely (like my techref) without management realizing that we are giving away info, we would be spending a lot more time re-inventing the wheel and a lot less time making cool gizmos. Right? James Newton, webmaster http://get.to/techref jamesnewton@geocities.com 1-619-652-0593 phone -----Original Message----- From: pic microcontroller discussion list [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of Wagner Lipnharski Sent: Thursday, August 05, 1999 7:03 PM To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: Re: [OT] Home Made SMD Soldering Terry wrote: > > We happened to have an old PID temp controller and termocouple from an old > upgrade project and hooked it up to a 600W toaster oven. Most of our boards > are small so it fits into the oven just fine. > > We put the boards into the oven and start the PID controller. Setting is > 80C for 15 minutes, ramp up to 120C in 15 minutes, hold for 10 minutes, > ramp up to 160C in 5 minutes and immediately back down to 80C for 15 > minutes. Open oven, do not remove board and allow to cool to room temp. [snip] Thank you Terry and other responses. I was thinking to assembly an oven designed just for this application, and I know that it requires an air flow to spread an uniform heat inside the oven, it also needs to have an opening to allow heat escape, so the temp can lower down when the heaters are off, and so on. As the max temperature is only 160¡C, I think it would be not difficult to build it. A piece (rectangular plate) of ceramic could be the platform where the board(s) would rest in the middle of the oven, and the temp sensors would be right between the ceramic and the board(s). My doubt is about; 1) Air Flow inside the oven... if necessary. 2) Where to install the heaters if no air flow is installed (side, top, bottom, everywhere?) 3) Solder paste, which one, model, type, codes, etc. 4) There is a bunch of other chemicals related to SMD soldering, cleaning, coating, etc... where to find all this information. You know something... For more than 2 years I have being receiving a free magazine named "SMT something", every issue I read entirely (as I do with the others), and I never found nothing useful about solder paste codes, types, other chemicals, practical experiments and so on.... but yes, lots of advertisements of huge new automatic machines and lots of specialized software... I need to come here to get something useful, isn't interesting? Thanks. Wagner.