Hi,
Anyone in the a market for a reflow oven? I am in the process of tracking the company of the QS-5188C to see if I can get one. I sent them a message through TopTenWholeSale.com. See what happens next week.
I am looking to do small batch manufacturing.
I would be very very wary of depending on these cheap tools for small volume manufacturing. They might be ok for hobby use, one-off prototypes, etc, but I wouldn't use it anywhere repeatability is a concern. I am totally happy to be wrong, but so many people loose so much time trying to get the production quality to an acceptable level it is worth keeping in mind. Seeed uses the 5180C, and has for years, but they also have a room full of inspection and rework kids going over every board.
So what would you suggest? I was thinking of trying hot plate or maybe go the toaster oven route. I just need something. I could stick with hand soldering which isn't too bad thanks to the drag soldering tip I won from you guys. Big life saver!
Unfortunately I don't know enough to answer :) Sparkfun wrote that post years ago about buying an expensive reflow oven and moving to a Target $12 hot plate instead. That's not what they do now, i assume. Adafruit uses a reflow hot plate and (I'm told) a modded toaster oven. Akiba at FreakLabs does small scale manufacturing on a big reflow hot plate (you can see it in our Beers with Akiba video). Seeed uses the bigger Qinsi oven in 100-500 pieces production runs. The next step up, a zoned reflow oven like we saw at cerebretech in India (I suspect sparkfun is using one now) is way less expensive than the average pick and place ($2000 at Manncorp?), but takes a ton of room. This is just what I know is out there. I don't have a lot of experience myself, I hope to gain a bit of experience by buying these tools though. Many people here are probably much more qualified to speak to this than me, I've only been peripherally involved in production.
hi, i am Chinese supplier of QS-5188C destop reflow oven..:)) contace me
There are several larger ovens that look promising, like [taobao HW-R109C] I quite like the fact that there is an PC software for the oven, and that it looks to me to be PID control of the temprature element makes that one of the better ovens.
For an small procuction run, I would aim for an oven in the $2500 range. This means that you should be making money on the oven, and that you have some way of getting paste on the boards without any large hassle.
In my opinion, doing larger series (more than 100 or so) at home is for the most of it not worth the hassle, there are assembly services that start looking good past the 500 board mark, and there
I have an T962 oven, and while the oven may be cheap, I get fairly consistent results, my boards are usualy less than 10x10cm and consist of mostly passive components. I would not use that oven for series production, the temprature control is to crude and the oven heath is uneven distributed. It did help quite a lot to let the fan run slowly, but there is still room for improvement.