Circuit Board Heat Gun

My circuit board has about 250 components including 0402 passives and a couple of 0 5mm pitch tqfps and it s a bit of a pain to assemble it using a soldering iron.

Circuit board heat gun.

Hot air soldering is customarily used with surface mount devices being attached to printed circuit boards. A common heat gun is an inexpensive way to reflow or reattach electronic components that have been soldered together. Using a heatgun to remove scavange parts from old or broken pcb. The top photo shows a board that has been populated and reflow soldered in an oven and the bottom photo shows the bare board.

Circuit board pre heat workstations are very expensive 350 00 2500 00. The heat gun was under 10 and it is really usefull to have around. The following descriptions use that method and focus on a small section of a printed circuit board as shown below. And because hot air guns aren t as accurate as rework stations your resulting work area can wind up being pretty messy.

I using a old harddrive as a example. Here s what i was thinking might work. You can salvage most any surfacemount bga or even through hole parts using this method. Because hot air guns heat up a large portion of any pcb you re working on they can also cause significant damage to other components as well as the board s laminate.

I m curious how well a hot air gun would work for reflowing an entire board. While a regular hot air solder rework station could cost more than 100 a common heat gun available from most home improvement stores should cost no more than 50. Low cost circuit board pre heat workstation for solder re work. Apply leaded solder paste via a stencil onto the pcb.

The goal of this instructable is to demonstrate how to make a circuit board pre heat workstation for around 50 00 with no special tools and the majority of materials from.