23 Jan
2012
23 Jan
'12
2:39 a.m.
> Many hobbyists seem to be deathly afraid of
soldering SMT,
> particularly fine-pitch (0.5 mm) QFPs.
I've never understood it. I'm now deep into
the through-hole pass on
an assembly job I'm doing, and I'm hating every second of it, while
the SMT parts were a breeze. The world is full of backward people,
it seems. The fear of SMT is a knee-jerk reaction with no foundation
in reality.
Well, I wouldn't classify myself as "deathly afraid of" surface-mount.
But I don't like the little of it I've done, and that is the voice of
experience, albeit only minor experience, not "no foundation in
reality".
I'm sure that with proper tools and a fair bit of practice I could be
fine, but I definitely prefer through-hole. (My current tools aren't
really _bad_ for the job - I'm not talking a half-inch chisel tip on a
45W open-loop iron - but they're hardly ideal.)
Strictly, I suspect that it's not through-hole versus surface-mount but
0.1" versus 0.5mm; through-hole 0.5mm, if such a thing exists, would
probably aggravate me at least as much as 0.5mm surface-mount, and I
wouldn't expect 0.1" surface-mount to be any worse than 0.1"
through-hole.
Component size matters too. I've seen surface-mount parts that are
about four times the size of a typical grain of sand; I'm not fond of
the idea of dealing with such a thing at all. (It'd be better with
through-hole simply because the leads provide some mechanical mounting
which surface-mount doesn't have, but still not great.)
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