Thanks texaspyro. I received the items yesterday in perfect shape. They look real good. Cheers.

texaspyro wrote:

MRsDNF wrote:

Thanks texaspyro. I received the items yesterday in perfect shape. They look real good. Cheers.

Wow, that took a while. Most other places in upside down parts of the known universe only took a few days.

I will take at least two of these if you do another run.

Yeah, mark me down for a couple XML and a couple XPG if you do these again.

Thanks!

just ordered 2, ~$10 shipped

thanks for doing this

just arrived

very easy, very fast, very nice, thanks!

texaspyro wrote:

I have put the solder paste stencil up on OSHPARK.COM as a shared project. Download the .BRD file and send it to OSHSTENCILS.COM You will probably have to order two to meet their minimum order. When ordering, specify their minimum sized border (0.75”). Note that I have changed the MTG center pad from the original solid block. Also removed the solder mask from the solder overflow tabs.

Good thing I didn’t hit the order button :bigsmile:

So glad to have stumbled across this. Now I know how I can get stencils for the triple xml build, yahoo!

Just successfully re-flowed my first LED. Put an XML2 and a new driver into my old Regalight EDC AA size light. Much better. :bigsmile:

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!

texaspyro wrote:

relic38 wrote:

Maybe I’m spoiled though, haven’t tried spreading solder paste out of a jar yet. I guess with the stencil it will not matter much.

Works quite well. Easier than a syringe. Just scoop up a little on the edge of the spreader card and spread it. After each application, use another piece of the card to move the paste back to the edge. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I tested the stencils with that exact same paste… I didn’t want to thaw out my Kester. You could do Sagans and Sagans of stars with that little jar… a little goes a loooong way when you are applying .003” thick layers.

Pov wrote:

My sample of that mechanic solder paste from fasttech melts at about 180-190°C (356-374°F) as expected for Sn63 / Pb37.

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.

OSH Stencils wrote:

… as we’ve seen this stencil come through our order queue about 20 times…

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.

BLF17dd link

Tiny10 link

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!