On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 7:06 PM, Bob Blick <bobblick@ftml.net> wrote:
> Paste that has been around for a few years will still work fine for
> hobby use. In a professional situation where you are using a stencil,
> the consistency is way more important and you need fresh paste. In that
> case you would also probably be buying name-brand paste.
>
> For IC's, rather than applying paste to the board, apply it to the part.
> Put some paste on a mirror and spead it with a credit card until you get
> a thin film of it, then scrape the legs of one side of the IC on that
> film until you get enough paste on the legs, then repeat for the other
> legs. You can tolerate a small amount of paste bridging the leads,
> unless you use way too much solder you won't get hard shorts but you
> will get stray balls of solder all over the place.

Thank you AK and Bob for the suggestions. I will try that for sure. I
will be soldering very small QFN packages (CC1101 chips from Texas
Instruments).
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