Thanks. Which is a good brand of solder paste for this?
I used this solder paste from Fasttech.
It’s apparently a low melting temp solder. Mine melted somewhere around 250f. I wasn’t paying close attention to the exact temp, because I thought it would be closer to 360f.
I used this AOYUE 866 All in 1 SMD/SMT Hot Air Rework & Soldering Station with Pre-heater.
I did have the thermocouple on the MCPCB as it was warming up on the preheater, but I saw the solder melt a lot sooner than I expected.
I’ll do a few more to get a more exact melting point. :bigsmile:
Edit- I just did another one and kept a closer watch on the temperature. The solder liquified and the LED floated into alignment between 300-310F.
My sample of that mechanic solder paste from fasttech melts at about 180-190°C (356-374°F) as expected for Sn63 / Pb37.
Nice to know they’re there and waiting, I have 1 sheet I haven’t used yet, but who knows when I’ll mess up and kill off my stencils. Easy enough to order new ones this way, Thanks TP.
These have made modding an easy task instead of a daunting project!
It freezes fine in the bottle? I tried to Google it but got lots of results about Russia and freezing saeawater, some stuff about freezing flux in plasma, and ‘setting’ solder but nothing about freezing a bottle of flux.
Looks like I need to test the calibration on my nifty new hot air station’s thermal sensor. Or maybe I just didn’t have a good enough contact with the MCPCB. I’ll put a dab of heatsink grease on the sensor and try again.
We were wondering where this project came from as we’ve seen this stencil come through our order queue about 20 times, and now we know what it’s for! 
Thanks for all your support LED fans, for those that don’t know, OSH Stencils has 3mil and 5mil stencils now, so if you need a little more paste for this application be sure to select the thicker material.
Cheers!
-B
Ha. 
How did you track us down?
I hope it wasn’t due to the BLF SRK stencil
Welcome OSH Stencils!I think its awesome that you found us. I really like the forward thinking support that you are providing. Members have created a work around to find projects on OSH that are of a common interest by linking them to a thread here on BLF. This was done because of an inability to search for projects on OSH. Is there a possibility of some day getting a search function on the sight? With so many projects there it is daunting and time consuming to look through them all to find what you are looking for and I wonder how many potential orders have been lost due to impatience in searching. At any rate, thanks again and welcome.
Make it about 21, I just stumbled over this and thought this might ease the reflow process a lot.
Nice to have you on board.
And thx to texaspyro for making the layout.
HQ
I’m wanting to get a set of stencils for both sides of a BLF17DD V2.0 and for the MCU side of the Tiny10 but when I download the files from OSHpark and upload them to Oshstencil in the preview it only loads the outer ring, what am I doing wrong? BTW I was able to order the cree stencils no problem a few months ago.
You’re only getting the outer ring because standard oshpark gerbers don’t include solder paste layers. The paste layer pads are a little smaller then the soldermask openings.
A little earlier this week I had my mind on that subject. I was thinking that even a slapdash job of adding solder paste layers to the BLF drivers would be valuable to some of our members (including me). I’m not volunteering for the job right now though unfortunately.
I used texaspyro’s Cree LED stencil (from this thread) for the first time today, it was nice. Thanks texaspyro.
You don’t need to manually add paste layers, the board already has them. When creating gerbers your cam job only exports the layers you’ve selected. Mattaus would need to add paste layers to his cam job.
You are correct. For some reason I was assuming that nobody had bothered to add the paste outlines to the parts, but I just went back and looked at both the Knucklehead and “15mm 7135” .brd files and I see that the outlines are all there. I guess I was projecting my laziness onto others! 
Cereal_killer, I uploaded a copy of tiny10 that includes paste layers oshpark.com/shared_projects/BquLDSlh. It will work on oshstencil.com. I happened to have an original copy of tiny10 to use. Sorry, I can’t do BLF17dd as well, don’t have an original copy of that.
Paste and stop is added automatically to the pads when you create a part. Paste is the same outline as pads.
For some reason Mattaus is a glutton for punishment 
… he goes through the extra steps of making Gerber files and uploads them to OSHPARK,. Unfortunately he does not usually make the solder paste layers.
All you really need to do is upload the Eagle .brd file (assuming you are using Eagle to lay out your boards). This saves you the steps of running the Eagle CAM processor to make Gerber files and the icky/error prone task of selecting, renaming, and zipping up the Gerber files. Both OSHPARK and OSHSTENCILS can work directly with Eagle .BRD files.
I tried uploading Mattaus’ tiny10 .brd. Oshpark wouldn’t have it.
Error processing flie
• is not a valid Eagle board file
Oshpark’s way of saying they don’t like him perhaps. 
OSHPark is quite flaky with the .brd file
Is there an extra layer that should be selected to make a paste layer…I use Mattaus’s cam job to generate my board as well
edit
Yup…verified, I tested 2x times
1st time went into the Mattaus CAM job, added an extra process called it PasteLayer, changed to the GERBER_RS274X and highlighted the tCream bCream (saves it in the %N.XLN file), then ran the job…uploaded to OSHPark stencils…when I viewed the job the .gts and .gbs would work as a stencil…when I removed that layer and deleted the .zip and reran the job and uploaded the layers weren’t there anymore and it wouldn’t make good stencil builds
Come to think of it…when I created the tab…it duplicated the drills and holes, not sure if it left the Drills and Holes selected and I just added tCream and bCream to the .XLN file and OSHStencils just picked it up…