First SMD Board

The other week I ordered some boards to be made up from a project i'm working on, this was my first SMD board so I wasn't sure how it would all turn out.

My original plan of attack was to turn a low cost toaster into a reflow oven;  but after I wrote the PIC code and then chewed it over for a day or two,  I realised that the 10 sec steps I was using would be too much and I might potentially damage some parts if it ramped up too quickly.

So I opted to use a cheap DIY hot air gun;  so I stuffed a DMM thermocouple into one of the board mounting holes and then using a timer, manually ramped the temperature keeping a close eye on the elapsed seconds and temperature on the DMM display.

Although this seemed to work fine, I think I'm going to rework the PIC code to use 3 sec steps instead, that way we shouldn't have any big ramp jumps. I much prefer the idea of putting a board into an oven and simply pressing a button, instead of waving a hot air gun over the board.

The results of the hot air gun can be seen below; although It worked ok I was a bit shy using the solder  paste so I should have used more;  in the end I had to apply more solder using the soldering iron to a couple resistors and capacitors;  but the ICs reflowed really nicely.