hot air rework station

I have the Maxtra 852d+ works well seems to have good reports here cheaper

Seems a bit expensive and very much like the various 850 series found on eBay. I have an 852D+ something like this: Plan on buying a few nozzles, especially if you're going to be doing BGA chips. The 3mm nozzle is too big for tiny resistors, so also plan on buying a smaller round nozzle.

Ummm... that's a $65 price difference between the Sparkfun and the

Op 10/19/2015 om 10:02 PM schreef George Herold:

You can't go wrong on an Atten 858D+ hot air station. They sell cheap on Ebay straight from China. I simply bought an extra just in case the one on my desk breaks. I'm using it all the time.

That's the one I got. It's been trouble-free.

Yeah sure, that's OK. (If the cheaper machine turns into a hassle it's not worth $100 to me... you never know what you're getting on ebay. Mind you I've gotten some steals.)

I buy all my beer (and other deli stuff) from the store at the bottom of my hill, I pay a bit more, but I don't want them to go away. I feel the same way about digikey.

I've not bought a whole lot of stuff from sparkfun, but don't they seem like the right type of company?

I'll mostly be doing "large" stuff 805 size resistors, 8 to 16 pin

George H.

You don't need hot air for that! Just a soldering iron with a big tip (say 3mm / 0.12"). I'm currently taking a short break from soldering a bunch of 0603s on a board with such a tip... The most common mistake is using a tip which is too small. Earlier I soldered a 0.4mm pitch QFN with the same tip.

Soldering stuff down is no problem, getting some mutli pin thing off is hard, I mostly just cut all the leads with fine bladed cutters. I was thinking a hot air station would be faster.

A pinching soldering iron to get off R's and C's would be cool.

I'm an old man who likes through hole. (surface mount is not nearly as satisfying :^)

George H.

Hot air is definitely king for removing components from boards and soldering large through-hole components on multi-layer boards.

One of my recent rework jobs. Unfortunately someone else already damaged the PCB before I got to work on it:

Hot air works better for that. I recently threw my cheapo pinching soldering iron in the bin. I also used JBC but that isn't much better due to poor tip quality. The chance of damaging the PCB is very high because it is hard to tell when the solder has been fully molten. Also getting two tips to take up the solder nicely in the right place is hard to do. If I had to buy a pinching soldering iron I'd look at Ersa first because their tips are the best I have ever seen & used (also far better than JBC).

Hot air is most useful for removing things with power pads and large contact areas with planes.

Yes, they're quite handy because you can heat both ends of the component at once. Each tip should be roughly the size of the pad. Again, too small isn't good.

I much prefer SMT. No more lifting pads or blowing out plated holes when removing components. 0402s help fit all the crap on the board, too. ;-)

I have removed IC's off boards by making a simple tool to hold the IC out o f the steel straping used to secure stuff on pallets. You just use that to ol and a rubber band so the IC will be pulled off the board when the solder melts on all the pins. And then I use a propane torch to melt the solder. Sounds terrible, but it works. You might try it on some junk boards befo re trying it on a PCB you want to repair. I would expect a hot air station would be better, but a propane torch works.

Dan

I can solder up a circuit board full of 0603 or 0402 resistors and similar-sized actives a lot faster with that hot-air station than I can with a soldering iron.

Of course, it's faster yet with my $5 electric fry-pan from Goodwill.

Atten is a real and respected (Chinese) brand of test equipment.

--sp

Perhaps but it also takes an investment in using stencils and other associated equipment, storing solder paste, etc. I don't do that many prototypes.

When I bought my hot air machine, I wasn't sure it was going to work for me. So, I bought the cheapest that looked reasonable. I was planning on buying something better and more expensive at a later date, once I figured out what were the limitations of the cheap machines, and what was missing. Well, the cheap machine worked just fine and the only thing missing were a collection of nozzles and a spare heating element. I never needed to buy anything more expensive.

Much as I would like to support Buy American and support your local retailer, when the price differential is huge, it's difficult to justify. Also, I tend to get better service from eBay vendors than from retailers. Domestic distributors are all over the map with support varying from fabulous to dismal and no obvious pattern.

I've bought a few things. No complaints about quality, price, or service on the boards they sell. However, I haven't bought anything that they resell, such as the SMD desoldering station in question.

All those have exposed leads and connections, so you shouldn't have any problems. It's devices with connections under the chip, such as BGA chips and SMD power xsistors, that cause me difficulties. I had two total failures. Reflowing BGA chips without the correct nozzle didn't work because I couldn't get even heating of large chips. I use a toaster oven instead. Resoldering alumina hybrid RF power amps, with heat sinks attached, was a futile exercise. Note the blobs: Also, minimizing the air flow to prevent burning adjacent parts or blowing away parts, required some practice. I sacrificed a few random PC boards to learn how it's done before attempting the real thing. Aluminum foil heat shields are a necessity.

Chinese and ebay... "Silence you foul temptress"

Thanks all,

George H.

Just yesterday I had to remove an encoder from a PCB and install in different PCB. At first I tried a soldering iron and solder wick. Yeah, it removed much of the solder but I couldn't get the encoder to release from the board.

I have the sparkfun equipment to which you refer and used it instead to unsolder. By using my narrow nozzle and moving from one solder connection to the next, I got the encoder to come out with no damage.

I then soldered (not hot air) into the other board and everything worked beautifully.

I like the Sparkfun hot air station even though I have only used it about 10-20 times.

Thanks, (I placed my order...) I've taken off parts with a hot air gun, but it's a bit like using a sledge hammer to drive a nail.

George H.

It depends. My encoder was about 3/4 inch square with 5 normal pins on one edge and two large holes for the body mounting. Like this:

The big holes were attached to the to the ground layer.

I solder a dot of solder onto each bare pad, paint it with a flux pen, place my parts, then either toss it onto a hot plate or play the hot air gun over it.

It sounds complicated, but it's still faster than hand-soldering everything.

The only things that really don't work this way are LGA packages -- unless the solder dots are perfectly even there always seems to be a short one that doesn't get soldered and has to be redone. Paste seems to solve this problem, though.