[chadaustin]

Yeah, I was disappointed by the lifted trace. It was only on the assembled one. The others all look fine to my untrained eyes.

Because I had low confidence in my circuit, I ordered the cheapest possible assembly. I assume hand-assembled or a mix, given one of each part.

I’m hoping to attempt hand assembly myself soon. Picked up a hot air station and a new set of parts from Digi-Key. :)

[murderfs]

If you're using stencils (and as long as your boards are relatively small, there's almost no reason not to with how cheap they are from jlcpcb/oshstencils), I highly recommend buying a jar of Loctite GC-10: it's the best solder paste I've ever used, and it lasts forever. I have a jar that expired 2 years ago and is still great.

Also, the T-962 reflow oven is pretty good for its price, with a bit of modding (flashing open source firmware (https://github.com/UnifiedEngineering/T-962-improvements), removing masking tape that melts and stinks, and adding a thermocouple for cold junction compensation).

[amelius]

Did you try SAC-305 solder pastes from different brands?

I'm quite happy with my current SAC-305 solder paste from ChipQuik, but curious if I could find an ever better one.

[murderfs]

Checking my fridge drawer: I've used leaded mechanic paste, and SAC-305 mechanic, SRA, and MG chemicals (plus chipquik low temperature bismuth paste, but it was terrible: I had parts literally falling off the board).

They're all significantly worse for stenciling than GC-10. If you're manually applying paste with a syringe, you might be better off with other paste, because it's significantly thicker than the usual pastes I've tried, but I usually just hand solder instead of waiting an hour for refrigerated paste to be better.

When this tub of GC-10 actually has any symptoms of being expired, I'm definitely going to buy another (or maybe GC-18, which seems to be the new shiny version? I don't see any ebay listings for cheap almost-expired GC-18, sadly.)