<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Paul,</div><div><br></div>I have been looking for the schmartboard that I bought at frys for a while now. They aren't bad but they are spendy. What is the pitch on the pins? I have some sot23-6 stuff that I don't want to etch for.<div><br></div><div>Don</div><div><br><div><div>On Jan 11, 2009, at 1:51 AM, Paul Stoffregen wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>Thinking of difficult SMT soldering, I recently received some junk mail which turned out to be 2 samples of a little surface mount adaptor from a company called Schmartboard. I was about to toss them when I realized they had a chip from Analog Devices, which turned out to be a pretty nice opamp (AD8608), so I took another look.<br><br>They claim their little boards make soldering even the very fine pitch SMT parts easy. The idea is that the "pads" are slight recessed channels that are fairly long and already have the solder in them. The legs of the chip fit into the slight recess, so they can't get mis-aligned. You do have to add flux, but not solder. You're supposed to just push the already installed solder along the pad using the tip of your iron. Because it's a trench, it guides your iron so you can't go crooked, and you end up pushing the correct amount of solder onto only that 1 pin and can't get a solder bridge because the recessed pads keep the chip and your iron aligned properly.<br><br>At least that's what they claim. I was going to just throw them away, but I'll bring them to the next meeting and anyone who wants them is welcome to take them. I think you can request this free sample on their website too?<br><br>I have no affiliation with this company, and honestly at $5 or more for each one, I'm not planning to buy much of their stuff, if any. Years ago I invested in fab'ing a bunch of boards with adaptors for almost every type of SMT part and I have no problem soldering the normal way. They're a little ugly but get the job done.<br><br>But if you're wanting to solder wires to fine pitch SMT and can't, maybe these could help?<br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>dorkbotpdx-blabber mailing list<br><a href="mailto:dorkbotpdx-blabber@dorkbot.org">dorkbotpdx-blabber@dorkbot.org</a><br><a href="http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/dorkbotpdx-blabber">http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/dorkbotpdx-blabber</a><br></div></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>