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I purchased a Weller reflow set

Jan Cumps

The title says it all. I have a Weller solder station. They have IC reflow gizmos that work together with its hot air gun.

image
image source: sinuss.nl, the element14 retailer in Belgium and the Netherlands

These are little ovens, that you put on top of the IC you want to rework. Then you put the hot air pencil inside, to flow the solder.
There's a chip lifter (think: coal mine headframe) that can then lift the IC.
It can also be used to place ICs. Should help me with BGA designs.

It may be over-fancy. Paul Daniels and Louis Rossmann do all of this with just a heat gun. But I'm not that skilled - don't do it enough to be repeatedly successful.
My kit is also expensive. The one I bought, with support for 10x10 mm to 33x33 mm (with 6 steps in between), costs 500 €. An amount that I do not easily give away for tools.

Here's a video from Weller:

I have now burned my budget for the next two years (three years actually, but last year I didn't buy anything). It 'd better work as promised.
Send me your old PCBs, so that I can practice.

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  • in reply to dougw

    The solder is heated with the hot air directly. The housing spreads the heat over the IC's surface.

    The lifting works with my station's pick-and-place vacuum pump. It has 3 air connections. For the hot air pencil, for the desoldering sucker, and the pick-and-place one.

  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    It’s an interesting tool Jan.  I’d always read that one should try and uniformly heat up a PCB with the hot air tool to avoid localised hot spots and I took that to mean try to avoid keeping the hot air in one place too long but keep it “moving around” the part.  This looks like a way of evenly heating up the area around the chip: I bet it works well with the board on a hot plate.

    How much clearance around the IC is required?

  • in reply to Andrew J

    Also, if I think about it, €500 doesn’t sound like a lot for a Weller station albeit a big investment.

  • in reply to dougw

     shows it in this video, at 3'10"