I modded my heat block today because it broke.
4.5 years ago I made a tiny heat block for reflowing leds and driver boards, from a block of aluminium, two cheap heating elements meant for 3D-printers and banana plug connectors to power it from a power supply. I posted about it here. It looked nice back then:
It has served me extremely well but after 4.5 years and countless refows, the wood has burned and recently has cracked. And I already was not happy that it was so tiny and instable that it was permanently clamped into a vice to be usable. So I disassembled the parts and made a new housing for the heat block. Here is what is leftover from the wooden housing:
And here is the new housing.
It has quite some improvements over the old version. 1) it can be used without the vice, 2) the wood is thermally further away from the heat block, so it will not likely char/disintegrate, 3) the block is mounted sturdier overall, 4) it provides some working-surface directly next to the block, to prepare and cool off the ledboards, that was really missing in the previous version.
It appears that I can use the same power supply setting as before, i.e. my standard 2.8 A for reflows (~18W) still gives around 200 degC in steady state. Apparently the heat loss speed in this new housing has not much changed.
This will work for many years to come 