With a successful through-hole design under my belt I am now ready to try fabricating a board that uses surface-mount components. I have been reading about this, and have gathered that the DIY crowd has gotten reasonable results with "hot plate" reflow soldering.
I think I understand the basics of this technique, but one point on which I am still unclear is the necessity of a solder resist coating. Is reflow possible without it?
I have seen a kit from LPKF for adding a solder resist coating to a prototype board, but do I really need it?
Best Answer
In general, reflow soldering would work w/o solder resist. You might get a higher incidence of solder bridges without solder resist (solder mask) than with it.
Among other things, the incidence of solder bridges depends on the pitch (spacing) between the pins of the ICs you’re using. Fine pitch pins are easier to bridge. For example, you’d get more solder bridges on SSOP packages with 0.025” pitch than on SOIC packages with 0.050” spacing. What IC packages do you have on your board?