I was wondering if the space has a reflow oven?

#21

We have plenty…

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#22

I tried making a board with the default heat cycle. The results were inconsistent – like @Calum_Nicoll I had to reflow quite a few components afterwards using hot air. I was using lead-free solder paste, and a bit of Googling suggested a hotter peak temperature, 245 - 255, for lead-free. So for my second board i tweaked the peak temperature to be 245, and set it to last a bit longer.
Watching the temperature display when running the oven, the temperature looks to be consistently lower than the target temperature. Anyway, I had much better results after tweaking the settings, even though the oven didn’t seem to reach peak temperature at any point.

TLDR: the default preset now works well for lead-free solder. If using leaded solder you might want to dial the peak temperature down a little.

#23

Did you pre-heat you PCB first? Then apply flux before solder paste? I followed that procedure as suggested by @courty and results were consistent - using profile programmed at the time.

#24

Flux before the paste? Would this be advised if using a stencil?

#25

@courty does the same apply when stelcilling solder paste onto PCB?

#26

No, I will try preheating the pcb next time.