soldering SOIC to DIP

Hi, I'm faced with soldering an SOIC chip to a SOIC/DIP adapter. Does anyone have any suggestions/tips on how to go about doing this. My past soldering experience has been with larger/less precise jobs. Should I attempt this with a standard soldering iron? Toaster Oven? Maybe there is a adhesive of sorts that I could just use a toothpick? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,

Kevin

It isn't hard. Tack down two opposite corners first, then go back and resolder all the pads.

An 0.050" pitch SOIC is *very* easy to solder with a standard soldering iron tip. As someone else said, just tack a couple corners down and go from there. It helps a bit if you flux the board first with a flux pen and use nice rosin flux 63/37 solder. The tip doesn't have to be especially fine, and neither does the solder. The finer pitch (0.65mm and 0.5mm) parts are not that hard either, but you should have some good desoldering braid on hand to clean up shorts.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I hand solder an occasional SOIC chip with a 1/32 inch conical tip. Anchor the board well, so you aren't chasing it around the bench. Turn on a good light and wear your reading glasses.

I paint the under side of the pins with a flux pen. Then I tin one corner pad with .020 63/37 tin lead flux core solder. Then heat that to molten and slide the chip into place with fine curved point tweezers. As long as only one pin is soldered, it is easy to look things over and reheat to make any needed adjustment, including just holding the chip down with the closed points of the tweezers and reheating the pin to get everything down, flat.

Then I solder the opposite corner pin. After that, it is easy to touch the tip to the end of each pin, and add a little solder on top. If any pins get bridged, I clean up with a little solder wick.

As others have said, just go for it. I've done down to SOT23-5 (to a board I cut with an xacto knife!) by hand with a 1/32" conical tip. It's much easier under a stereo microscope, but it's not necessary. I've found that some experience using a microscope to do small parts makes it easier to do them without the scope later because you can visualize what's going on even if you can't see it.

I'd actually say SOJ and PLCC are trickier to do by hand, because if you get a solder bridge it's tricky to get rid of (acrobatics with a solder sucker) and you can't easily see the bridges in the first place.