What do you need for smd hot air soldering?

[brejna]

Hi everyone, I am starting to learn a bit about smd, so any help would be appreciate it.
what do you need except hot air gun and tweezers? Is there special solder, paste or? where to buy it? tips?

[stevie1556]

You can use a standard solding iron and solder. Melt a bit of solder onto one of the pads, place the component down and reflow the solder. You will need to keep hold of the component to keep it in place though, then solder the other side of the component like you would with a standard through hole part.

If you're just starting with it, that's the way I would go. There isn't any need for a hot air gun and paste if you're only gonna do a few boards here and there.

For tweezers, search eBay for 'SMD tweezers'. You can get ones with a black coating that are ESD safe for a few quid/dollars/euros from China. Depending on what you find easier, you can get prongs which are either straight or bent. For a hot air gun, mine is from China. There is a seller which keeps stock in UK/US/AU that had a multi temp iron and multi temp and multi airflow air gun. I think I paid about £60 for it, but I've used it a fair bit and can highly recommend it. Also, solder paste is stupidly expensive from most electronic suppliers, so I suggest you get some from eBay. I've tried 2, one is about £3 is a syringe (the syringe is near unusable, so use a tiny screw driver to apply it). The other one is about £10 and came in a pot, seems easier to apply, more in it. Not sure which I prefer so buy a few and decide. Just remember that the paste needs to be kept in a fridge, and will need warming up before it can be used. Also, they only have something like a 6 month shelf life, depending on the paste.

When I get a spare 5 mins, I'll post some links for you.

Sent from my thumbs using Tapatalk!

[brejna]

Thanks for info
I saw on the youtube a lot of guys are using bunch of equipment so I was thinking do i need all that..
I was thinking of buying Gordak hot gun, it is chip and I've heard that they work well. Also I've seen those pastes on the ebay, but certainly your experience would cut me few corners. BTW if you have good supplier for parts it would awesome..

[rullywowr]

You can solder smt as mentioned with a standard iron and regular solder. If you want to do the whole board in one shot you can use a hotplate or better yet a "reflow skillet" with solder paste. Sparkfun has a great tutorial on this just google "reflow skillet".  They also have great tutorials about soldering smt by hand too.

To remove smt parts, a hot air tool is the best. I picked one up on amazon for about $50 I believe. It's like a mini hot air gun in a pencil format.  It allows you to melt the entire smd part and remove with tweezers. Also works a treat for small shrink tubing jobs.

[mattlee0037]

Ohhh I like that hot skillet method