Sometime in the next month or two, I will be ready to try my hand at assembling a really simple board I'm working on that uses SMD parts. I have a few years of experience with PTH soldering, and have soldered SMD chips before with a soldering iron, but never a whole board of parts. I'm not ready to go the whole nine yards and buy a professional hot air rework station, or to get / build a reflow oven. I'm hoping I don't even need to get into stencils or PnP stuff too much either. At the end of this post, I'll post the board design I'm thinking specifically about, if it helps.
Recently, MAKE Magazine posted a link to this heat gun from Harbor Freight:
http://www.harborfreight.com/1500-watt- ... 96289.html
- Will this be a good thing for me to use to solder small 0603 parts (LEDs, resistors and caps) to a small board and maybe even ICs?
- Can I simply dab a small amount solder paste onto each pad / part, stick them together and then run the hot air over them until they turn shiny?
Here is the current unrouted board design (a work in progress), just so you can get an idea of parts count, placement and board dimensions. The board is just a hair under 2x2" (5cmx5cm).
The large rectangle on the left is an RN-42 Bluetooth module from SparkFun.