On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 10:16 PM, William "Chops" Westfield wrote: > Have you seen http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2009/05/06/how-to-make-pcb-sol= der-paste-stencils/ > =A0? > > (there are some other possibly useful stencil/smd articles there as > well. Hi Bill, Thanks for the link. That's almost the right thing. One of the things Limor is doing is shrinking the pads along both axes, which I'm trying to avoid. What I'm discovering is that although I like having large pads as they aid in wicking the solder as it reflows and in giving me a large target when hand soldering, just exporting the cream layer isn't as effective as I'm getting too much paste on the board. What I really want to do is take some of the apertures and say, change one side to make the stencil deposit less paste under the SSOP, concentrating the paste around where the actual leads touch the board. I think it might help me as I do manual pick and place to get the chip aligned nicer as well. I might give her method a try even so. Thanks! Josh --=20 A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 -Douglas Adams --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .