Two points to note, the thermocouple is mounted directly on top of a heater cartridge not the centre of the plate. the wires passing through the metalwork have no grommets and could lead to a possible failure.

Excellent review - it looks well built. Good brand-name jab regarding the fuse... :) BTW - For measuring the surface temperature to calibrate the controller, I would recommend placing a bit of insulation either over the whole plate, or over the individual thermocouples. Because of the heat loss on the upper surface of the thermocouple, there is a very good chance that calibrating without insulation will result in a surface temperature higher than the readout would indicate.

Thanks for sharing !

Great stuff. Thanks

I have done some reflowing on a laboratory hot plate. It works well, except that one time I let it get a little too hot and the fiberglass resin in the PCB melted into a molten black puddle. The smell was so bad, and probably really unhealthy... I've been eyeing one like this for a while after seeing one on Marco Reps' channel.

Hi, i want to buy this unit to replace bad LED's on TV backlight LED strips. Do you still have the unit? If so, is it still working good? Are you still satisfied with it? Hope to hear from you soon. Many thanks in advance

Please how is the resistance wire wired, can u please help, I but a 110v, instead of 220v, please advise

I guess like a lot of equipment it would be normal to leave it running for 5 to 10 mins before using to allow the temperature to settle.

Great video once again :)

Hi Florin how about making a wifi controller for this to be able to make heating profiles like in the oven?

Hi do you know what is the width of aluminium base? It will be interesting to view how fast the plate rich the set up temperature and how long is need it to go down if you want to use reflow profile.

They marketed that it provides uniform, even heating, but it looks like the heating elements are only in narrow spots on the plate. They are selling that thing for 30 euros on aliexpress + 30 euro shipping. Super cheap

That is the same as the one I purchased a couple of months ago. I got mine for doing MacBook repair work.

Super 👍

Please what's is the input voltage

I know this was only a test, but maybe if you cut 2 long rectangles in a plastic sheet the length of all the pins, it would make a decent stencil because the plastic sheet thickness would limit the paste volume. The low paste volume would naturally stop bridging when it sucks to the pads, so a continuous line shouldn't be a problem.

A nice equipment to have for the ones doing a lot of reflow manufacturing. For an amateur as myself I think I will stick to my hot air gun for the time being. And one little suggestion for your channel; I think it is about time you invested in a SLR camera and a decent camera stand. Sometimes it really gets messy trying to film with a phone in one hand, and this compromises the quality of your videos. This video definitely needed a better close-up shot with a zoom lens, which is not possible with a phone camera without getting it dangerously close to a very hot plate. Best regards!

Often the power cables supplied from China have barely enough copper in them to not cause problems during normal operation. If something goes wrong i.e. a short with low but not very low resistance (circuit breaker doesn't trip magnetically) they can become very hot. Unfortunately it's hard to determine the conductor thickness without either cutting the cable or buying equipment to measure low resistance. It would be possible to measure the voltage drop across it with a known current though and calculate the resistance and then the cross area.

Please how can I convert my hot plate, from 110v to 220v

I didn’t like how there were no grommets in the chassis for the wires passing through, mine was the same.

how do you clean your hot plate

I've been curious about a setup like this for awhile. I don't know if a device like this is going to be my solution though. I would have preferred to see a more in-depth characterization of the temperature across the entire surface. I admit I have no experience with hot plate reflow. So my opinion is useless. That said, I'm concerned about reflowing larger boards in the future and the potential for temperature variation across the surface while doing a real flow profile seems like a potential issue. Why the heck does this thing need to get to 946C (1735F)? Is someone looking to reflow brass with this? I do wish these Chinese manufactures would recognize their market though. The ability to hack this kind of thing is probably the primary selling point. This kind of product is obviously as low of a manufacturing cost as possible. However the choices in hardware used could have an exponential impact on the way customers view and popularize this kind of thing. Adding an extra $1-$3 to the hardware BOM could make an enormous impact on the DIY/Hobbyist market. Just choose an AVR, STM32, or PIC μC, and place a functional programming header footprint on the PCB at a minimum. If there are any unused pins on the μC, break them out to unpopulated pads. If they must do some cost cutting thing like a couple diodes to drop Vcc voltage or can't afford to add proper bypass caps, make the footprints anyways. Most of us are going back and fixing this stuff already. Just make these things easier to do in the first place. Lastly they need to make a note on the product about where to find and download the source code. They have nothing to protect here. These are bare bones products without any real competition in the market. Just make it easy for the community to make use of the thing. Not to bring politics into this (I'm not stating my viewpoint on the subject here, it's just an observation),... but selling an open source product that includes access to hackable hardware and software as a general policy would be about the most pro-socialist kind of neighborly thing possible. I'm surprised someone hasn't figured out something like this and implemented it as a general standard for products from China. -Jake

you must mean Weller lmao

For preheating a PCB that already has components installed on both sides (rework) and therefore has to be elevated above the plate, wouldn't it work better if the plate was black? (Grill paint would probably be a good choice.) At work, the usual rework procedure is to set the hot plate to 150C (the board on a holder that's elevates it about 1cm above the plate) and use a heat gun or iron to actually melt the solder.

17:32 hahaha true true

Lucky