I’m a mechanical engineer, and in my spare time I also enjoy working on electronics.
I was looking for a reflow oven to solder SMD components. Since I couldn’t find a suitable option, I designed a device from scratch which can be used for reflow, annealing and filament drying.
The device is fully industrialized, so in principle it could be sold commercially. However, the design is not optimized for mass production, which means the price will inevitably be higher than that of a cheap kitchen oven.
I originally built it for personal use, and I expect to be able to use it for the rest of my life. Still, I’m curious about how much interest there might be in such a device.
Key specs:
-Max. PCB size: 305 mm × 244 mm (ATX board size)
-Shortwave IR heating elements with very fast response time
-Low thermal inertia
-Maximum temperature 260°C
-Primary heat transfer mechanism: convection
-Independently controllable top and bottom heating elements
The device is primarily designed to solder PCBs (reflow). However, there are two additional functions and that is the reason I’m posting it here in this forum:
-Device can be used to dry 2x 1kg spools of filament
-Device can be used to precicely anneal 3d printed parts (the device can basically follow any temperature curve over time).
So my question is:
How much would you be willing to spend on a device, which basically allows to follow any set temperature curve over time?
IR heaters need some kind of feedback between the heated object temperature and the heater PID, unless you can instrument one and all of the units are the same, like on a PCB conveyor line.
I don’t need an IR filament dryer.
Mostly I need convection and medium to high external air exchange.
If it’s over $100 you should really consider categorizing it as an annealing oven, with possible second use of drying, because for $100 you can get a world class food dehydrator that puts out serious CFM of airflow.
It is no contradiction.
The heat is generated by IR heating elements (100%).
However, the heat transfer mechanism to heat up the workpiece is primarily convection and not radiation.
I’ am not aware of any device on the (consumer) market which can precicely follow a temperature profile.
If you were to anneal a 3D-printed part, you could, for example, start at 60 °C and then increase the temperature to 80 °C over the course of x minutes. You can create your own temperature profile which shall be followed.
I don’t know how big the potential for annealing is in general, but it is clear that such a device would allow to fine tune such a process and use it consistently.
Well, yes, not exactly the same category? Of course there are industrial devices available, but I would assume they are rather in the range of >5k and have the size of a big fridge. The device I am talking about is more the size of a microwave.
interesting. This looks more like a high temperature oven for aluminum melting? The working volume is extremely small. Do you own such a device? What‘s your use case?
It is like the one I linked before, same usage. Chamber is tiny because it’s not about huge amount of material rather the linear constancy of the inner temp, that has to be precise in its cycle
I was looking for something similar and found this ( Veekaft Ambient Drying Cabinet 16L on AliExpress ), but it doesn’t seem to follow predefined temperature curve, which is a must for PCBs and proper annealing. 25x25x25 is fine, but 30x30x30 would be even better for annealing larger parts. Not sure if your design allows it, but reducing the volume by partitioning the internal space would also be nice.
I can immediately tell you that this is way too low for fast heating. This device might be fine for holding a specific temperature, maybe even for slow increase of temperature over a longer time (annealing). But this device will not allow any proper reflow profile.
The sealing is not 100% tight anyway, but you can also (automatically) open the door. Either always (few degrees) or only a certain period (for example 1 min per hour).
