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Model Railway - What's your latest acquisition?


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@Jeff Mennell

What is it ?

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It's a temperature controlled hot air reflow station. These are specialist soldering tools for printed circuit boards. Instead of a traditional soldering iron to solder multi-pin components, IC's for example, you place a special type of soldering paste on the PCB connection tabs, rest a SMD (Surface Mounted Device) onto the pasted connection points. Then the hot air from the station melts the paste and solders all the pins in one go. It's other use is to allow multi-pin components to have all their pins de-soldered at the same time to aid easy and efficient removal from the PCB they are soldered to.

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It is based upon the technology used in factories that make electronic component boards. If you look at any modern circuit board, you will find that 97% of the components on it are SMD ones. A robotic machine places a squirt of paste on the PCB connection points, then picks and places all the individual SMD components in their places. The solder paste acts temporarily like a glue to hold the SMD components in place and stops them moving. The board then goes through a temperature controlled air chamber where the paste is activated by the heated air to melt and solder the components in place en-mass.

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They also make excellent hot air guns for shrinking 'heat shrink tubing' too.

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I haven't got one in my electronics soldering kit tool box, but I am familiar with what they are.

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PS - I have been looking at this bit of kit (it's on my desirable wish-list). It is as close as one can get to the factory manufacturing process at home. However at 2,000 euros I would have to have a Premium Bond win before I would actually buy one. The demonstration video on the home page does however give an example in principle of the application of the paste and the robotic placing of components (later section of the video from time-stamp 6 minutes onwards).

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https://cirqoid.com/

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This additional URL link, just included for anybody who is interested to learn more

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Ah, I see which fourm you mean now, however, I have neverd of that forum before and I have never used it.

 

I don't know if that did work as how you intendid it to. The hyperlink was for the log in page.

 

EDIT:

It looks as if you have to have an account on that forum, to view the threads. I haven't clue what to do now! 😆

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Cool! Sounds good! Looks like I must check it out, but it's a waste of time to set an account up, if I decide I don't like and/or don't want to use my account on the forum. The general public should be able to read the threads, but can inly comment with a registered account, like this forum!

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