Boatguy
Well-Known Member
I haven't seen a tutorial on this here, so here it is.
I was extremely nervous about screwing this up and put it off for a while, but it was really simple. I had 100% success with 40 leds.
The only tools needed are a multimeter, tweezers, stovetop, and frying pan. A thermometer is good to have but not necessary. Just be careful not to actually fry your leds. I put my stovetop on medium, to start, for about 2 min then turned up to medium high till the solder turned to liquid.
Here is everything set up to go
These bare emitters are very tiny and a pain to handle.
The method i used with the liquid solder is just a stripe across all three pads on the thermal star. It will get pulled to where it belongs when it gets to temperature.
Stick the emitter where it belongs, making sure positive on the emitter matches the star.
Then put them in the pan and start warming them up. Check the spec's for your emitters because they arent all the same. Some of mine could take up to 215 Celsius, and the other ones were around 150. The main thing is to not heat them up too fast, but the process shouldn't take longer than 5 minutes.
Few minutes later they quickly solder to the stars.
And a continuity check with the meter lit mine up
This was really simple to do compared to all the different ways ive read about. One at a time with a soldering iron looked painfully slow, and all the tools sold for surface mounting are extremely pricey. Start to finish it took an hour and a half but that was only because my burner heats extremely uneven, so i had to continuously move the pan around. Plus if something went wrong i wouldn't fry them all at once.
The cree leds ran me 2 dollars a pop and the stars were $1.00. The 10cc chipquick syringe was $22 but in hindsight i should have bought way less. Probably only used 2 or 3 ccs.
Hope this is helpful. I will try to answer any questions but im just a rookie at this.
I was extremely nervous about screwing this up and put it off for a while, but it was really simple. I had 100% success with 40 leds.
The only tools needed are a multimeter, tweezers, stovetop, and frying pan. A thermometer is good to have but not necessary. Just be careful not to actually fry your leds. I put my stovetop on medium, to start, for about 2 min then turned up to medium high till the solder turned to liquid.
Here is everything set up to go
These bare emitters are very tiny and a pain to handle.
The method i used with the liquid solder is just a stripe across all three pads on the thermal star. It will get pulled to where it belongs when it gets to temperature.
Stick the emitter where it belongs, making sure positive on the emitter matches the star.
Then put them in the pan and start warming them up. Check the spec's for your emitters because they arent all the same. Some of mine could take up to 215 Celsius, and the other ones were around 150. The main thing is to not heat them up too fast, but the process shouldn't take longer than 5 minutes.
Few minutes later they quickly solder to the stars.
And a continuity check with the meter lit mine up
This was really simple to do compared to all the different ways ive read about. One at a time with a soldering iron looked painfully slow, and all the tools sold for surface mounting are extremely pricey. Start to finish it took an hour and a half but that was only because my burner heats extremely uneven, so i had to continuously move the pan around. Plus if something went wrong i wouldn't fry them all at once.
The cree leds ran me 2 dollars a pop and the stars were $1.00. The 10cc chipquick syringe was $22 but in hindsight i should have bought way less. Probably only used 2 or 3 ccs.
Hope this is helpful. I will try to answer any questions but im just a rookie at this.
Last edited: