[hpsdr] Hot Air Soldering

[hughes3hns at aol.com]

Here are a series of technical articles which explain why Hot Air 
Soldering/ Rework  is better than hand soldering and basically how to 
do a good job at it. They also explain why bottom heating is necessary 
and a lot of other trivia.
Even if you don't have all of the fancy equipment you can still benefit 
 from the principles and maybe take a minute to design your own from 
common household products.

http://www.zeph.com/

Click on Technical papers on the left.

Here, at work, we use a HART ( Hot Air Repair Tool), A machine which 
basically blows heated air on both the top and bottom of your board.. 
It isn't really all that complicated and still allows you access to the 
board to work on it while it is still being heated. Everything is 
bolted down so you don't have to balance a hot air gun in one hand, a 
soldering iron in another and the board in another.
What you want to end up with is a cross between a convection oven and a 
hand held hot air gun.

Mostly you just want to keep the temperature fairly constant and 
blowing in  a small area so you don't have to do everything at once. It 
shouldn't be all that hard to  hook up a small squirrel cage fan to 
blow the air and design a small, or large,  temperature controller.
And it makes removing those hugely small multipin IC's just as easy as 
melting butter.


Just one more source of information.

N7BMG
Peter Hughes
Hagerstown, MD
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