reccomend tweezers for surface mount soldering?

Mike,

You'd probably want to have a small selection. I've always found that a curved set (like digikey EROP7SA-ND) is nice, especially when handling small SMT parts under a microscope. A couple of straight tweezers like digikey EROP3CSA-ND are nice. Finally, a nice "reverse action" set is nice to give you that extra pair of hands sometimes (digikey XHT412-ND). These are all pretty inexpensive.

Alan

Michael No> Hi - recently I was reccomended to get some tweezers to assist with surface

is where I obtained my Swiss "Cobaltima" by Excelta cobalt alloy tweezers. A bit pricey but *very* tough and menacingly sharp.

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Christopher R. Carlen

I like a stubby little Solingen (German) "La Cross Premier" pair that I got for $10 or $15 at a drug store chain (Shopper's Drug Mart). They are a fair bit stiffer to operate than the typical fine tip tweezer, and the relatively fat and square tips meet properly.

For *very* fine tips, good steel is better than SS, IME. That kind of tips tend to be brittle rather than soft, so they will snap off rather than bend all over the place if abused a bit. I don't have the really good Swiss one I used to have anymore, but I don't seen anything in that class for sale at Digikey. They were probably $30 or more a pair.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
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This place has them listed for only $46 apiece.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com

I use Bernstein 5-031 Titan I don't know if it is available at digikey, but it is not magnetic and also doesn't get soldered. You can use it even for very small parts

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ciao Ban
Bordighera, Italy

Hello Michael,

I just bought a few at places like Walmart and they work fine. Other than that I second what Spehro suggested. If tools like this come from Solingen in Germany it is "the good stuff". Not just tweezers but also kitchen knives and things like that.

Regards, Joerg

Can you get those with the cushion handles, those are much easer to work with IMHE, allowing the part to be rotated in your fingers like chopsticks.

"A man without his favorite tweezers is like a woman without a mirror", Harry

I use a set of 4 tweezers, 1 each straight and curved nonmagnetic for placing parts only, and 1 each straight and curved heavier duty steel tweezers for unsoldering. Any tweezer will pick up small smt parts, but only a clean and dry nonmagnetic tweezer can reliably let go of them. Any residual magnetism or tiny bit of flux on your tweezers will make many parts stick to one side of the tweezer when you are trying to let them go. Depending on how you solder, this may or may not be an issue - some people always put solder paste on the board before placing components, and components placed on pasted pads will stick more to the board than the tweezers. Solder paste has a short lifetime on a preheated board, so I like to lay out groups of 20 or 30 parts next to their pads on the preheated board, apply paste to the pads for those parts, quickly move the parts onto their pasted pads, solder with hot air, then repeat for the next group of parts until done. This prevents the solder paste flux from losing activity (it appears to dry out) before soldering, but requires the clean nonmagnetic tweezers to be able to let go of parts on the dry board.

Put "dumont tweezers" (no quotes) into the search space in <

> and pick your dealer and model. I don't believe anyone makes a better product.

Ted

Looks like everybody has their favorite models. Might as well throw mine in:

They are particularly nice for picking 1206 and smaller parts (like resistors) out of tape strips. Expensive, but indispensible.

-- jm

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Wow, and I thought it only was tweezers being marketed to technical markets that could command high prices!

Personally, I love my curved-tipped Exceltas. I don't know which model... I recall they weren't cheap (>$20), but there were others that were even spendier than were simply out of my price range.

Probably come up with a load of Groucho Marx related stuff :-)

--
"Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference
is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more

Look for:

• Self-closing (squeeze to open) - it saves you from dropping a lot of tiny parts, and gives your hand a break

• Solder won't stick - nickel plating seems good for this; ceramic/carbon would probably; maybe stainless

• Non-magnetic - it only takes a tiny charge to make tiny parts stick to the tool

• Sharp tip - more important for tiny parts like 0402

I really like these ($5) - they're stiff, sharp, but not non-magnetic:

These look similar: ?Ref=228016&Row=6497&Site=US

To fine-tune adjustment, dental probes work really well. (I'll suggest a technique if you're interested.) Also for picking at SMD legs to test for poor solder joints.

?Ref=226981&Row=277259&Site=US

This is a handy alternative if you do much assembly:

For 0402 and 0805, the 22-gauge (black) 1" needles can be formed into a tiny pickup tip.

Cheers, Richard

Often you can make a suitable vacuum pump out of a diaphragm-type aquarium pump with a few minutes' work - attach another piece of tubing or flip the valve. I forget who wrote about doing just that- Dobkin maybe.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com