Re: SMD soldering?

Andre, there are also a lot of video guides to doing SMD soldering on  
YouTube that show various tricks for doing it with home-grade  
equipment.  There are even some rather heroically brave demonstrations  
of doing it with a complete crap 5W iron that I would not attempt  
myself, where the guy wipes hot solder across all the pins on one side  
of a 48 pin package at once with a big blob then magically soaks it up  
with braid leaving a beautifully mounted device.

...but there are some actually good guides that are worth watching.

Another thing that can help a lot is a stereo microscope on an arm.   
You can sometimes find these on eBay fairly cheap.  I used an  
illuminated magnifying loop to solder wires onto the flash roms on my  
PS3 motherboard a couple years ago and it was headache inducing  
compared to using the microscope, so I recommend steering away from  
the graphic designer magnifying lamps.

Justin

On Nov 1, 2009, at 7:49 AM, André Fachat wrote:

> Hi Scott,
>
> I'm soldering SMDs onto newly made PCBs (my own design, for some new  
> boards of my selfbuilt 6502...) The PCBs got solder resist (solder  
> mask, Lötstopplack) on them, I didn't trust myself enough to not use  
> it...
>
> I did solder the other ICs with 1.27mm pin distance (74xxx logic,  
> RAM) with a small soldering iron and small solder and it worked fine.
> Even with traces running between the pins. I did use a magnifying  
> glass though... :-) (and some desoldering braid(?) to get  
> superfluous solder away).
>
> Only the other ICs I have are even smaller. I'm new to soldering  
> with flux, but it seems I'll have to give it a try.
>
> Thanks for your advice!
> André

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