Reflow Oven Build Guide

CRANK

This guide will show you how to build a great toaster reflow oven. It isn't difficult to build your own oven, and the result can be equal or better than commercially available ovens. Building it yourself will give you a better indication of what to look for, how it works and how to tune it to get excellent results.The reflow oven build described here is fully capable of fine pitch lead-free soldering at very high temperatures, and can do it consistently and reliably. The entire tray can be filled with PCB's, and all will reflow perfectly. It uses Controleo3, a 6-relay programmable reflow oven controller.This oven is designed to reflow lead-free solder paste with liquidus temperature around 217°C (max temp around 250°C). This is what is typically used by contract manufacturers making commercial PCB's. Typically, prototyping conditions should mimic the production environment to avoid mass-produced surprises. If you use solder paste with a lower liquidus temperature - some go as low as 1…