3 ms·

(Don't mean this to sound negative) I guess you make use of what you have, but if you are at the level of doing smd reflow, there are significantly better tool

(Don't mean this to sound negative) I guess you make use of what you have, but if you are at the level of doing smd reflow, there are significantly better tools at a low cost (hobbyist-level too). For smd rework I'd say better to use a cheap hot air station. Plenty of cheap ones that work ok, at least much better than such an imprecise tool as a blowtorch. For prototyping, you can buy kits with a toaster oven + controller that works pretty well for reflow. You plug the power cable of the oven to the controller, and the controller switch it on and off according to the temp profile. Works pretty well, we use one at work for small runs.

agumonkey 7y ago
It's cool to know that it's 'doable' even though I guess it require acrobatic levels of control and high charring rates :)
MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
You kind of missed the point here, which was that it is surprisingly doable using a ghetto-ass blowtorch when the correct tools aren't available, which is counter-intuitive. I would have expected this to go spectacularly wrong and leave a charred PCB, which it most certainly didn't ("When holding the tip of the flame ~15cm away from the PCB, it took over a minute to get the solder to melt and wet the plane.").
jacquesm 7y ago
One hallmark of the 'true hacker' is that they get the job done, no matter what the tools at hand (or even no tools, in some cases). This post is one of the very few posts on the homepage right now that to me makes HN worth reading. Using a brute force tool to do something extremely delicate.
wiml 7y ago
> if you are at the level of doing smd reflow, there are significantly better tools What do you mean by "at the level of doing reflow"? Techniques like this demonstrate that "the level" of doing reflow is much more attainable by resource-constrained hackers than people sometimes think. Many years ago, when my personal time-vs-money tradeoff was different, I made a number of surface mount PCBs by doing reflow over an ordinary candle or paraffin lamp. I would balance the PCB on a piece of metal shim to act as a heat spreader and keep the board from getting sooty. It worked really quite well up to a couple square inches — the trick was learning how to follow a preheat profile to keep the small passives from tombstoning.

agumonkey 7y ago

It's cool to know that it's 'doable' even though I guess it require acrobatic levels of control and high charring rates :)

MrBuddyCasino 7y ago

You kind of missed the point here, which was that it is surprisingly doable using a ghetto-ass blowtorch when the correct tools aren't available, which is counter-intuitive. I would have expected this to go spectacularly wrong and leave a charred PCB, which it most certainly didn't ("When holding the tip of the flame ~15cm away from the PCB, it took over a minute to get the solder to melt and wet the plane.").

jacquesm 7y ago

One hallmark of the 'true hacker' is that they get the job done, no matter what the tools at hand (or even no tools, in some cases). This post is one of the very few posts on the homepage right now that to me makes HN worth reading. Using a brute force tool to do something extremely delicate.

wiml 7y ago

> if you are at the level of doing smd reflow, there are significantly better tools What do you mean by "at the level of doing reflow"? Techniques like this demonstrate that "the level" of doing reflow is much more attainable by resource-constrained hackers than people sometimes think. Many years ago, when my personal time-vs-money tradeoff was different, I made a number of surface mount PCBs by doing reflow over an ordinary candle or paraffin lamp. I would balance the PCB on a piece of metal shim to act as a heat spreader and keep the board from getting sooty. It worked really quite well up to a couple square inches — the trick was learning how to follow a preheat profile to keep the small passives from tombstoning.