[Elecraft] Surface Mount tech; Orion; and K2/100

[Ken Knecht]

At 11:04 AM 1/8/2003 -0500, you wrote:

>On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Vic Rosenthal wrote:
>
> > Brendan Minish wrote:
> > >
> > > The average ' neat' solderer with a decent fine tipped Iron will not find
> > > the larger SMT sizes any harder to deal with than leaded components.
> >
> > I agree that it's not a big deal to mount a few SMT parts, for example when
> > doing a repair or mod.  But I can't imagine doing a K2 RF board!  For 
> my part,
> > at least, the stress generated by manipulating those tiny parts under a
> > magnifier severely limits how much work I can do at a time.  Ang God 
> help me
> > when one pops out of the tweezers onto the carpet (yes, I have a &*%$@ 
> carpet
> > in  my work area).
> >
> > Vic K2VCO
>
>
>I would enjoy the challenge (I think) of building an SMT kit but, I agree
>with the notion that we would fast approach critical mass if something
>popped out of the tweezers.  My "work area" is in the basement along with
>the hamshack and home theater.  For home theater purposes, the carpet is
>thick and the color is black.  Goodbye little part!
>
>Still, I don't know of a very good _perm_ flooring that makes finding
>dropped parts easy.  In a previous life, while doing component level
>(smt) repairs on cell-cite equipment in the field, I would lay down a
>"floor" of white paper tablecloth material around the area I was
>working.  If something was dropped and I couldn't find it against the
>white background, I could simply lift the edges and everything would move
>towards the middle.  It came in very handy more than once!
>
>73 de John - K4WTF
When I was a TV broadcast maintenance engineer the shop had a bare cement 
floor (I had a small pad in front of my bench to make it easier on the legs 
and feet from standing all day). When a small part was dropped we found the 
easiest way to recover it was the grab the push-broom and sweep up the 
area. If that failed, sweep up a much larger area. Always worked, though 
the parts we dropped were generally small bits of hardware - not tiny SMT 
parts.

73 Ken W9NPP