Surface Mount Soldering 101

[Chuckt]

Okay. I'm cheating a little bit because I didn't write this tutorial but I think this is a good example of Surface Mount Soldering.



It requires flux, fine tipped tweezers, a soldering iron with a fine pitch, an exacto knife and a magnifying device. They suggest using a chizel soldering iron (1/32nd of an inch) because it can hold the solder and they generally want you to have a temperature controlled iron. When it doesn't work, you need to remove the solder with solder wick. Don't forget a sponge and having an emergency bucket of water around.

There are youtube tutorials online and I'm still learning.

I think you can get a Weller WES51 for under $100 on Amazon. That isn't to say that you can't get some tips that are good enough for weekend hobbyists.

[brad]

Nice work,

It's all relevant and certainly a very handy how - to

[Chuckt]

I asked online and I'm amazed that people can spend upwards to $900 on soldering stations. A lot of it is personal preference but some are professionals that use replaceable tips in their surface mount irons and they don't want to wait for it to cool down before they change them.

They're saying that you have no control over the temperature in a 30W iron so you want a temperature controlled iron. Lead and lead free solder has different temperatures. 63/37 solder melts at 183C (361.4F) so the recommended temperature is 250C (482F) and lead free solder is recommended to be 250-300C (482F to 572F).

I found a soldering station and tips cheaper than the Weller after asking questions online. I haven't owned either one of these before and Weller is a name brand.

http://www.ntscope.com/Merchant2/mercha ... ode=AT201D

http://www.madelltech.com/Soldertips.html

Make sure you ask these companies and others a lot of questions unless you already know .

[brad]

If you work on SMD or any other components for that matter alot, then ideally you want a temp controlled iron / station.

When you go to solder a component, you are touching a small hot tip to a relatively cold joint - this causes the tip to drop in temperature, thats why the constant ones are great because they sense this drop and will heat the tip up back to where it should be.

The cheap irons have no such feedback, they dont have anyway of heating the tip up that bit more to compensate for the reduction in heat.

[sdudley]

I know I'm a little late to the party but here is the website with more tutorials to accompany the original post:

http://www.curiousinventor.com/guides/S ... _Soldering

Stacy