| Our company wants to buy a rework station for BGA's. I would like to know what is a good BGA rework station. IR or hot air? Do we need a rework station with optical placement or can BGa's be placed manually during rework. We have seen a demo of an ERSA IR rework station. Other than that we have seen Weller and OK Industries only in catalogs. Thanks for any info. Igmar, Focus on the bottom side pre heater. this will make or break the process. If you're an OEM and you do small boards of "normal" thickness, don't worry about it. If you're a contractor and you see all kinds of assemblies of varying dimensions, you will need a beefy bottom side preheater. SRT, AIRVAC, and Conceptronics are the closest. My money is on the Conceptronic station. Only drawback is it has an IR preheater. Welcome back to the stone age. The problem with convection on these things is nobody designs it properly (I think, sorry guys). I'm just a young guy and I don't have very much experience but I remember something from college about air flow and some funky 7:1 ratio. The air source has to supply enough volume such that its' output pressure is 7 times greater than the exhaust port's (holes in the plenum). Also, the plenum has to be a certain height in order to get the appropriate convection. Bottom line, their designs do the job but they are by no means theoretically correct and the functionality suffers. Think it through and ask other users. Regards, Justin Medernach
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