@Dermot it was budget at the time that stopped it - we had more important things to buy to get set-up like the scope and PSU’s etc. this is defo a ‘nice to have’ as opposed to a need.
We seem to have a mixed response - to clarify, I don’t mind either way. My electronic designs are almost 100% SMD these days. I personally have a hot air station and a couple of specialist soldering irons. I also have a converted toaster oven and believe me the oven is very random on flow and temp to the point where i’m back on hot air.
The thought in bringing the idea here was that I personally was considering one and though it may be nice to offer the idea to the group first, last night for example there were 3 projects that would have benefited from an oven with one almost requiring it.
The GLA budget is spent so this would have to be a pledge. I’m going to make my own call on this in a few weeks (after my holiday!) so the idea is still open.
I didn’t buy it because it was yet another hobby project relying on people with a million other things on their plate. i.e. It was a toaster over to be hacked at some future stage.
As a result I down graded it to the bottom of the list with the other things that I didn’t have enough information to actually buy.
John Nagle from Silicon Valley here. I’d recommend against a T962. TechShop got them for their locations, and they scorch boards. There’s a hot spot in the center of the workspace. On cycles for lead-free solder, it’s hot enough to melt the solder mask layer, while soldering parts two inches from the center successfully. There are mods for the things on Instructables, Hackady, and Github to make them behave better. But even then, lead-free work isn’t too successful. Using leaded solder paste and a cooler cycle has been reported to work on the modded units.
I’m trying to find a makerspace that found a good low cost surface mount oven, but I haven’t yet. Stanford University electrical engineering is setting up a makerspace, called “Lab64”, and I’m going to find out what they are using. Lots of people have modded toaster ovens, but that’s not workable in a commercial maker space like TechShop.
The LPKF ProtoFlow S from Germany looks good, but costs over €3000.
I love my T962 ! Great bit of kit but as Joe says, only after a lot of tinkering…
The first issue is that they use paper masking tape on the insulation. That all needs stripping and replacing with aero quality Kapton tape or the oven stinks and makes your eyes water…
The pcb burning issue is complex. The main board doesn’t have any compensation for the thermocouples so the internal oven temp varies widely. To fix this you need to add a DS18B20 sensor to the pcb end of the thermocouple connector. I also did a mod to control the fans (to even out the internal temp) and then finally reflashed the Phillips LPC21xx controller with an updated version of the firmware that knows about the mods…
My oven is now spot on temp and I can program my own curves to do lead and lead free boards. This is one (edit:two) I did last week !
