What Are SMD Soldering Exercise Boards?

SMD soldering exercise boards (or practice soldering kits) provide the perfect platform to improve your soldering technique. With the use of like for like dummy components and boards (which replicate the real thing) the operator can become familiar with the soldering technique that is required for differing components on a PCB.

They can also be utilised for machine evaluation, experimentatiom and other processes.

Our Solder Practice Kits from Topline cater for all skill levels, with everything you need, from components to the PCB itself. These kits include the PCB, along with the components packaged on tape or in tubes/ trays, ready for placement by machine.

Specs Of Our PCBs For Solder Practice Kits

Our PCB Practice boards are produced by TopLine, utilising the highest quality boards. Each have fiducial marks and tooling holes, which simulate real world conditions.

The fiducial holes help with vision recognition on assembly equipment, allowing for accurate location of the circuit pattern and component location.

Kits are supplied with enough components to populate one side of the board only, however most boards are still double sided.

Advanced Specs

FR-4
FR-4 (epoxy-glass) is standard for most of our kits. It is good quality and a general purpose material, which is used throughout the electronics industry.

Polyimide (Optional)
This should be included where high temperatures or burn in are anticipated.

Copper Thickness
1.0oz of copper is what most board lamanents use during fabrication.

Hot Air Solder Levelling
Topline uses HASL during board fabrication for controlled plating flatness. This assures coplanarity for fine pitch components.

Liquid Photo Imageable Solder Mask
Most Topline Solder Kits use LPI solder masks, yielding an even solder mask. This also does not interfere with the solder paste screen printing.

X, Y Theta: (Accessory)
Components co-ordinate data in relationship to the lower left tooling hole on the PCB.

Gerber Data (Accessory)
This is used to make the metal stencil for solder paste applications – available on all boards.

Global Fiducials
There are a minimum of 2 global fiducials provided for correction of translational offsets (x and y position) along with rotational offsets (theta position). This is located diagonally opposed, as far apart as possible on the circuit or panel.

Local Fiducials
These are used to locate the position of an individual component.