tweecer
Newbie level 5
Hey Everyone,
We have been manufacturing our product ourselves since June 2012, with great success. I have been using a $50 toaster oven that uses the older thin elements, which were slow to heat. It worked well enough with lead free solder paste, but at the behest of my wife (and business partner), we switched to lead free. What a cluster f*ck that stuff is. I scrapped 1 entire panel (10 units) and another half panel, trying to get the reflow profile right.
I purchased a smaller unit that has the quartz elements and it heats much quicker, but does not have convection fan like the older unit which was to 2.5 times the volume. The new unit is just large enough to fit a 10x10" panel. It has over heated the panels twice and I need to do some more testing while moving the temperature sensor around to see how uniform the temp is.
I cut and bent the metal wire grill to support the panel in 3 locations. Could that metal to panel contact be causing the panel to overheat?
There is an element at the top and one on the bottom, I have thought about moving the bottom one to the top and seperating them. They are both center mounted on the sides. I have a PID controller, but have been manually controllling the off on times.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be welcomed. This is a 2 sided panel with both sides populated. I can post pics of the the panel and/or oven...
We have been manufacturing our product ourselves since June 2012, with great success. I have been using a $50 toaster oven that uses the older thin elements, which were slow to heat. It worked well enough with lead free solder paste, but at the behest of my wife (and business partner), we switched to lead free. What a cluster f*ck that stuff is. I scrapped 1 entire panel (10 units) and another half panel, trying to get the reflow profile right.
I purchased a smaller unit that has the quartz elements and it heats much quicker, but does not have convection fan like the older unit which was to 2.5 times the volume. The new unit is just large enough to fit a 10x10" panel. It has over heated the panels twice and I need to do some more testing while moving the temperature sensor around to see how uniform the temp is.
I cut and bent the metal wire grill to support the panel in 3 locations. Could that metal to panel contact be causing the panel to overheat?
There is an element at the top and one on the bottom, I have thought about moving the bottom one to the top and seperating them. They are both center mounted on the sides. I have a PID controller, but have been manually controllling the off on times.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be welcomed. This is a 2 sided panel with both sides populated. I can post pics of the the panel and/or oven...