![]() With our reflow oven in place, we were finally ready to begin processing boards real time. But with plenty of patience they got it in place just fine. As you can see in this picture, they had very little room to maneuver it. They were very careful about not damaging anything. This machine is so large that we had to clear out all sorts of areas to receive it properly without damaging our facility or the machine itself. Thick - Thin - Leaded - Lead-Free - Double Sided, there's nothing we could not process with this machine.īefore it arrived we had prepared our site to bring it in. It can reflow any type of circuit board you can imagine. ![]() This reflow oven is about 16 feet long by 4 feet wide. This picture was taken the day it arrived. So we picked up this guy.Įnter the Vitronics Soltec XPM3 820. Thankfully, WAi had moved into a new facility that offered a full compliment of power choices. Many of the joints were not reflowing properly and we were spending too much time soldering many of our products by hand. Ultimately, towards the end of using this machine, it started to give us some real headaches. Smaller boards would obviously be faster, but sometimes we'd build very large boards that took very little time to run through our pick and place machines and then they'd be sitting around waiting to be put into the reflow oven. So the speed we could process boards was largely dependent on how many boards we could fit into the chamber. It could perform one reflow cycle every 8 minutes or so. But as we were growing, it just could not keep up with the demands we were placing on it. While it might not look like much, this is actually a very capable, machine. After a long a hard search, WAi found this guy, affectionately known as "R2D2". There is no 3 phase power, UPS only comes once a day for delivery and pickup, and the fastest internet you're going to find, even today, is probably 56k. It's a beautiful town in the Berkshire Mountains but there is little convenience for a manufacturer. They were located in the small, lovely, town of Worthington, MA. When you reflow the second side of the circuit board, all of the components on the bottom must hang freely in the air, allowing the surface tension of the solder to hold them in place)īut WAi had another problem. (Basically, there are surface mount components on the top and the bottom of the circuit board. Especially as the complexity of the circuit boards we were building kept increasing and this old style of reflow oven had no capability to run what's known as a "double sided" circuit board. It was obvious to WAi that we needed something better. What would result were inconsistent reflow and on some occasions having to run circuit boards through the oven more than once. The temperature inside the reflow oven wants to drop dramatically and the oven does not have the horse power to maintain its temperature. Once you start to load up the oven with circuit boards, those circuit boards act like ice cubes in hot soup. The trouble with this reflow oven is that it cannot hold its temperature very well. You can plug it into single phase 220VAC and you can reflow the solder paste on circuit boards. This style of oven is called a "bench top reflow oven". This, believe it or not, worked fairly well for very simple assemblies. Place the circuit board inside, close the door, set the timer, and come back. ![]() Like most contract manufacturers it all started with a toaster oven. WAi has a long history with reflow ovens. But once the components are in place, you still need to solder all of them. Components are then placed onto the circuit board, on top of the solder paste. The stencil allows us to apply a very precise amount of solder paste on the circuit board, exactly where we need it. During the SMT process, a thin layer of solder paste is "printed' onto the circuit board using a stencil.
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