SMD Reflow Oven T-962

[Demon]

Awesome. Subscribed to this thread so I can study this.

I have a solder gun / reflow station and tweezer station; just more contraptions I was things of adding to "the machine".

Thanks.

Robert

[rsocor01]

I own the T-962A, which is bigger than the T-962. I've "cooked" thousands of boards using this reflow oven without any problems. If you use panelized boards that are too big, sometimes you get a component in the outer edges that doesn't get soldered. But, a quick eye inspection should be enough to take care of this. The reflow curve that you use to program the oven is very important. If you choose the wrong curve you can burn the board or you can get cold solder joints.

I do recommend the T-962A, but I haven't tried the T-962 model.

[David Barker]

I looked into this ages ago and it seems many people were having mixed success with the "T" range ovens. I ended up building my own. To speed things up I used off the shelf components and the results are fantastic. I wrote a little article here:

http://www.firewing.info/pmwiki.php?...low-Controller

I've profiled the oven and there are very little deviations in temperature across the horizontal. This means I can easily reflow a board up to 9" x 10" (22cm x 25cm) without any hot or cold spots - all the paste reflows. Importantly, the results are reproducible and consistent. One thing I would strongly recommend is that you can monitor the profile temperature in real time. This ensures you can see how close your oven temperature matches the paste and / or component profile. The cheaper ovens allow you to set a temperature profile, but how do you know if your oven is actually doing that? Finally, I would also recommend an oven with a fan (convector) to stir up all that hot air...

[Archangel]

I looked into this ages ago and it seems many people were having mixed success with the "T" range ovens. I ended up building my own. To speed things up I used off the shelf components...

What Brand of oven did you use? Is it still available?

[David Barker]

The oven I used was this:

http://www.ecateringonline.co.uk/gas...ice-1871-p.asp

Although I got mine on sale for about £150.00. It's extremely well made, all stainless steel and well insulated. Nice and big too. A lot of money, but my aim was to build a "batch" oven of high standard that could do large or multiple PCBs at one time, rather than a toaster reflow - there are tons of those on the internet, I wanted to do something a little different. For example, something like this:

http://www.blundell.co.uk/product/ha...h-reflow-oven/

will cost you about £3,000 GBP (about $5,000) but mine was a fraction of this. It uses a rear mounted heating element which I removed, but kept the huge fan - I mounted two additional heating elements at the top and bottom

http://shop.electrolux.co.uk/product...eating+Element

which fits perfectly, giving a power about of about 3.3kW (the professional batch oven above is rated at 3.6kW, so not far off)