Ive been working on converting a toaster oven into a PCB reflow oven for assembling PCBs. Im using a Controleo3 to convert a regular convection toaster oven into a reflow oven.
choosing a toaster oven
The first step is selecting a toaster oven to convert. The Controleo website suggests keeping your oven as small as possible. This minimizes the volume of air and steel which act as thermal inertia causing the oven to heat up and cool down more slowly. They also suggest skipping on the convection option for the same reason. I of course proceeded to completely ignore those recommendations and purchased this massive convection toaster. Most of the reason i went for this model was that i found this album of assembly pictures using the same model.
Construction
Now that i have all the parts i can begin deconstructing the toaster oven and removing the old electronics. All of the old knobs and PCBs are removed to clear space for the new Solid State Relays(SSRs). Even though the SSRs are fairly small they need to have a lot of air in their compartment in order to effectively dump their heat. In order to avoid having large holes in the front of the oven from the old switches, i remove the plastic knobs from the original encoders and attach them to the front panel.
Now that the oven is dismantled i can install the 2 main SSRs and heatsinks. These allow the controleo 3 to independently power the top and bottom heating elements, giving you much more control over the distribution of heat in the oven. The third smaller SSR controls the convection fan. Below the convection fan is a 5V wall wart to power the controleo 3 from mains.
to be continued…
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