Out of Pod Experience

I got lucky and scored a small industrial oven at Goodwill for 10 bucks - yeah I thought it was a toaster oven. My GF wanted to get rid of it after it went up to like 500 degrees and revealed its true nature of not being intended for food. I jumped on the thing and said "no f**king way!" while thinking one word: REFLOW.


Edit - and on hackaday today: Solder reflow toaster oven


Now that I remember, I used to program a large reflow oven used for avionics systems. It was a conveyor system roughly 15' long with a "heat profile" - there were roughly 8 or 10 sections with different heat levels and there would be a "peak" in the heat at roughly 10' after a long slow climb in temp, and then a drop off that was almost a straight line down to the end. It would take roughly a minute or two for a board to pass completely through it.

Reflow is not just throwing heat at a circuit board and various boards had different profiles that were depending on what kind of components they had.