Thursday, February 8, 2018

SMD soldering using halogen bulb

I had soldered SMD components that comes in 1206 package using soldering iorn with less effort. But anything less than 1206 is very tough to do with the iron. Recently I saw a video in which a halogen lamp (head lamp of car) is used to de-solder SMD components. I thought I will give a try to solder with solder paste and halogen lamp. Here are the results.

Solder paste that comes in syringe.


I used a small trimmer screwdriver to dab small quantity of paste to the pads on the pcb.Then I placed the SMD component using tweezers. The below picture shows SMD capacitor in 0603 package.
After placing all the components, heated the board using 12V 100W halogen lamp by holding it closely to the board for a minute, slightly moving around.

Here is the result. The quantity of the solder paste matters and it has to be just right.

A word of caution:
The halogen lamp gets really hot and needs to be handled very carefully. Also I had sunglasses while working as it gets really bright.