Building a Reflow Oven

Re:Building a Reflow Oven by mindcrime on Monday July 22, 2019 @12:03AM (#20495269)

Suppose I were looking for a ready-to-go reflow oven at some kind of reasonable price. Where would I start? Any recommendations?

Here's the rub... there are relatively inexpensive, COTS reflow ovens out there[1], and they do work - more or less. The problem is that many people find them to be more on the "less" side of that spectrum, without putting considerable work into upgrades and mods anyway. And once you take a cheap T962 off the shelf and start modding it, you might start to ask "why not just build my own from a toaster oven?"

The toaster oven conversion winds up being cheaper, or - at worst - a wash, from a price standpoint. And many people find that they get better results from the converted ovens than they do from a T962.

Unfortunately, the next "hop" up in quality in terms of commercial ovens winds up being a pretty big jump price wise.

I haven't tried this myself yet, but I have a friend who has both a T962 and a conversion oven (made from a Black and Decker convection oven, so a little pricier than the model cited in TFA), and he only actually uses his converted oven. I trust his opinion a lot, so if/when I decide to get a reflow oven, I'm leaning hard towards doing this.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Happybuy-Soldering-Machine-Infrared-A...

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Re:Building a Reflow Oven by fest on Monday July 22, 2019 @03:37AM (#20495982)

I've also had less screwups using the regular toaster oven instead of T962. I suspect that's because T962 uses IR heaters instead of convection.

I've regularly had slightly charred or even molten connectors on boards reflown with T962. The most extreme case was broken inner layer traces (on a board with black soldermask, which apparently had a bit too much moisture inside- the board layers visibly popped).

An interesting side note- large LEDs don't like being reflown in IR ovens. The lens on large LEDs also works in reverse- it happily damages the bond wires by focusing incoming IR radiation to a point.

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Re:Building a Reflow Oven by mindcrime on Monday July 22, 2019 @12:55PM (#20499867)

I've also had less screwups using the regular toaster oven instead of T962. I suspect that's because T962 uses IR heaters instead of convection.

I suspect so. Especially if one follows the advice of adding an extra heating element to their converted oven. It's not just about having more raw heating power, it's about having the heat coming from multiple places, so you get more even heating.

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Re:Building a Reflow Oven by mv4 on Monday July 22, 2019 @09:30AM (#20497790)

I have one of those (T-962) at home, and I am pretty happy with it.

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Re:Building a Reflow Oven by mindcrime on Monday July 22, 2019 @01:04PM (#20499977)

I keep thinking about buying one, but for now I've convinced myself that the amount of SMD work I do is small enough that I can rely on either hand soldering under magnification, or using my hot air rework station.

Most of what I do prototype wise is still through-hole, or the larger SMT packages (SOIC, etc.)... the only reason I'd use one of the smaller packages would be if the component I need is only available in that package. Unfortunately, that's becoming more and more the case.

Anyway, if I need a component that's a real fine pitch QFP or something, I'd just hot air solder it to a breakout board, and then jumper it in... unless it's something where that little bit of extra capacitance would screw something up, or where EMI would be an issue. But I'm a hobbyist, so that stuff isn't usually an issue here.

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