I have followed my insperation from spark fun and I am now soldering Lead Free boards in my modified oven toaster . Picking and placing with an automated m/c I got on ebay for £300 (its a Japanease MDC ECM93). I am even solder paste printing with laser cut plastic film.
Where I do have problems is with manual stencil printing fine pitch components such as QFN’s.
I have just done 130 boards which had two 40pin QFN’s. Although we succeeded in the end we probably printed over a 1000 boards to get our yield.
I started with a simple arrangemet with a laser cut .006" s.s stencil clamped down. It was possible to print with this but I found the stencil would “lift” in the middle causing a small gap between the stencil and the pcb (probably about 5-10 thou). This resulted in paste bleading out between adjacent pins and joining up. A good board should have neat little steep wall sided lumps on each indiviaual pad, rather than the range of sand dunes I often would get sprawling over all the pins.
To get round the “gap” problem I got the stencil mounted in a proper frame and got a cheep ebay printer from HK. This improved the process but results were never consistent. We often got the “sand dunes”, missed pads or poor alignment which meant we were cleaning a lot more boards than we were producing. Thus the bottle neck in our process was not being able to paste enough boards to keep the P&P busy.
The paste I am using which was recommended to me as good for fine pitch work is Kester EM918. We found that the more we “worked” the paste the “sloppier” it got and the worse the results. We found we got the best results when we took the paste straight from the fridge.
Are there some “must do” prerequisists I should be following ? Is a $2000 stencil printer going to solve my problems ? Is my experience a common problem ? :?: