Surface mount capacitors

[jackinnj]

Originally posted by Peter Daniel
Interesting use of nuts istead of standoffs.

btw, there are a lot of sellers of standoffs on the Bay -- for a couple bucks you can get hundreds. (who needs hundreds?)

[Peter Daniel]

Actually I was admiring the creativity
Nothing wrong with mounting boards in this way.

[gmarsh]

Originally posted by Peter Daniel
Actually I was admiring the creativity
Nothing wrong with mounting boards in this way.

It works, and it's very secure.

I do have standoffs, but there's a couple of problems...

- my standoffs are threaded
- a couple of the heatsink holes are drilled into fins, so I can only put a screw in from the amplifier side.

So if I put a screw in, I can either tighten the standoff against the amplifier PCB, or tighten it against the heatsink. Doing either will prevent the screw from turning so I can't tighten everything together all at once.

Using two nuts instead of a standoff means I can keep everything tight. And to the person that said I can get cheap standoffs really easily, I'd like to see you find an 8mm standoff that's as cheap as two M3 nuts.

[Sigurd Ruschkow]

A nice SMD soldering method is to use a hot plate. Weller sells one and you can set the temperature of the hot plate to what the solder paste requires.

First, put solder paste onto the pads, and then put the SMD components on the paste, and then put the PCB on the plate.
As the PCB gets hot the solder will melt and the components will nicely be "sucked" to the center of the pad.

Just watch out for bent PCBs when heating them. One can put some heavy parts on the edges of the PCB so it stays flat.



Sigurd

[Sigurd Ruschkow]

I find it hard to agree that SMD resistors are all bad. There are some very good SMD resistors out there. It is just hard to find them (and sometimes to buy them). They can be very expensive resistors but that is also the case with hole mounted audiophile resistors like Vishay S102k and Caddock MK132 and Riken resistors.

I am thinking about Vishay's SMD bulk foil resistors.
Here are some links to the VSMP resistors:
http://www.vishay.com/docs/63096/vsmp1206.pdf[/URL]
http://www.vishay.com/docs/63099/vsmp1506.pdf[/URL]

You can also see on this photo that even Mark Levinson is using SMD resistors for their attenuator board:
http://www.marklevinson.com/image_library/32AB_lo.jpg

That preamp sounds rather good according to the people who have reviewed it.


Sigurd

Originally posted by ingvar ahlberg
is still lousy resistors, You can find metalfilm resistors in melfpackages but nothing close to the quality of even the most comon through hole metal film resitors. SMD/SMT is all about producing high volume cheaply.

[jackinnj]

Originally posted by gmarsh

Using two nuts instead of a standoff means I can keep everything tight. And to the person that said I can get cheap standoffs really easily, I'd like to see you find an 8mm standoff that's as cheap as two M3 nuts.

...and a lock-washer

[leppp]

That surface mount slone 11.4 looks good. I'm assuming its in its case by now Maybe some more pictures and a board layout? Does it have any measurements done?