Wow that is great, thank you!
I particularly appreciate the intentionally casual technique, and lack of precision shown, to highlight the effect of surface tension with the wetted solder.
Very illuminating video, I had no idea that the leds could tolerate that duration of time at the solder’s melting point, or that thermal shock was the greater issue. I would have hurried it and had poor joints and raised, heat shocked emitters if I’d tried it on my own experimentally.
This is something that I’ve been putting off learning to do, I’m now quite inspired.
Thanks again.
I think you are right. I was wondering 60w was one of those small traveling irons.
Now I think about, LEDs get very hot. Hotter than a clothes iron I guess.
I have a Weller solder station.
I’ll scrape the corn bread out of my skillet and use that
We were indeed talking about different irons, but, coincidentally, I have also used an ironing iron before! That also worked, it was a different project though. My solder paste has a melting point around 175° (measured with IR temp).
you can use skillets, mug warmers, hot plates, anything you have that gets hot enough.
its easy to overheat the LED qwith little thermal mass and high power heat source
slow and steady heat up and cool down is important especially for flip chip LEDs
and same as for food if its too hot the LED gets crispy, may have a bad taste when it is dead or quite working after very short of time
I don’t have a measurement I can give you, but I will say it’s quite thin. In most cases the LED will appear to sit perfectly flat with the mcpcb. If you can see a gap, the emitter is probly sitting to high.
Thanks. It tells my I botched my first reflow which I did yesterday.
But the purpose of my question was to get better understanding of thermals of solder joint.
With XHP35 running at full power we’re talking about temperature delta exceeding 20 °C per 0.1 mm of joint thickness. And that’s assuming no voids, which is probably unrealistic.
I see that Osram / Cree recommend reflowing with stencils resulting in 70-100µm joint. But I think that standard reflow doesn’t involve applying pressure to the LED, does it? So maybe what we do here is better? Or maybe no, I’ve seen some post here on BLF telling that manual reflow can’t result in a joint as thin as that with a stencil. I also found a joining process from Indium Corp which leads to 40 µm joints (though ones of poor thermal conductivity, overall not better than good paste).