Hi, Everyone > Hi Guys, we have successfully done a few boards > now with SMT PIC chips in a cheap toaster oven, > they are coming out quite good. > > Many thanks to Alexandre who sent me a temperature > vs time chart, and helpful "expert" tips. You are welcome Roman. I have been out for a while so I will post some details so that everyone can see that the crazy idea of soldering SMT on toaster ovens works quite nicely... I am doing about 500 boards a month with 200 '0805' components and one SOIC avr Cpu and have not problems at all. The oven is a small 800w toaster oven with infrared "burners". The temperature profile is controlled by a comercial temperature controller that can do 'ramps'. The full cycle for a board is 6 minutes because I prefer to start the temperature slowly and keep it for a while bellow the flux activation phase just to make sure the board temperature equalizes all over. We have produced more than 4000 boards and had no problems at all with the soldering procedure. I even have SMD components on BOTH SIDES of the board and solder them all at the same time. The tension of the solder paste keeps the components from falling down. I would never try to build a moving conveyor !! It would make things much harder to control. I got the temperature profile from my setup and it beats a 3 zone oven by much. It is almost as good as a 7 zone oven. You get many more problems when you move the boards. If you have big production needs just go and buy a big oven or have the boards made by someone else. I got some of my board analysed with xray and all is really fine... If you want to try the toaster oven go ahead, it works nicely.... Be carefull with the temperature profile, use 2% silver solder paste and use only evens that have mostly infrared heating. I could not get repeatable results without a nice temperature controller. If anyone have any questions I would be happy to help in all I can.. PS: I am not in Africa, Roman... I am down in Brazil. It seems that we have 2 brazilian Alexandres on the Piclist. Best regards, Alexandre Guimaraes alexg@iis.com.br -- http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu