Drilled solder paste stencils

Very nice. I tried this once on a CNC machine, but instead of drilling, I used a fine drill rod to punch the holes in Lexan sheet. It worked well enough, but your holes and the printed paste look better than mine. How did you finish the holes so nicely? No burrs at all.

-- Joe Legris

Sand>

Call me stupid, but I'm missing the key "how to do it" part. Looks like a stencil was cut, and then somhow solder wound up on the boards. How was that done? I'm really curious to see how, since this process looks really good in the pictures, and the best you could say about my SMD soldering is that the solder joints tend to hold... mostly...

Looks like once the stencil is cut, you just swipe some paste over it and it deposits through the holes. So I would guess that you lay the stencil over the board and use a small squeegee. This would be almost identical to silk screening.

Cheers!

Sir Charles W. Shults II, K.B.B. Xenotech Research

You align the stencil with the board/pads, hold it >

Ah ha. Definitely in the "now that I know the answer, it was obvious enough I should have realised it" category.

But how do you get the pad coordinates so you know where to drill the holes? Is there and easy way to extract it from gerber files? Ringo

Joe Pfeiffer wrote:

Awesome work. The stencils always kept me from entering the SMD age, but this may actually be the solution. Thanks for posting this!

What material did you use for the stencil?

Now if I could get my CNC machine to position the parts... . ;-)

Matthias

I can > But how do you get the pad coordinates so you know where to drill the

Google >"solder paste stencils"<

Matthias Melcher wrote:

Awesome. I alreaddy decided for my first SMD project. I can finnaly get my FTDI mounted and the USB-to-serial converter going ;-)

(Yes, I know, I can also solder that one by hand)

Matthias