A wonderful design!
For Spoty micro-dot solder paste syringe dispenser
I build amateur radio kits, and more and more of them are being made with surface-mount components. Some of them have a mixture of SMD and thru-hole components, and most of those pre-solder the surface-mounted parts to the board for you. But more and more often, these kits have fewer and fewer thru-hole parts and more SMD. I've had one kit that was about 85% SMD and have a new one that's nearly completely SMD. There's fewer and fewer that pre-mount the SMD components for you, so you need to develop the skills and get the tools to build these kits.
When I set up my workbench a few years back, I still had not done any SMD work, but I knew it was rapidly approaching. So I started acquiring the tools to work on these parts -- a hot-air pencil station, a programmable soldering hot plate, tweezers for holding the components, and a microscope so I could even SEE them. The old magnifier with a ring light around it on a spring arm just wasn't enough, and I hate those huge magnifiers that go on your face like glasses. So a fairly decent electronic microscope with an LED display helped immensely. But applying solder paste was a real issue.
If you don't use a stencil, you need to have some way of applying individual dots of paste to the board. Solder paste IS sold in little air-piston syringes for this purpose, but the plungers to squeeze it out onto the board are nearly universally uncomfortable to use, and most don't even hold in place in the syringe, so they're constantly dropping out when you set them down. Powered dispensers were expensive, powered by air compressors and vacuum pumps. But finally, someone came out with an electronic extruder that didn't use compressed air, it used a stepper motor and a microcontroller. It works very well, but it's really a pain to load and clean up when you're done for a while, and can be very wasteful of solder paste. It's a shame to have to put it all together just for a few parts, or for a short period of assembly. If you have to assemble boards all day, it's perfect, but just for a couple of hours? Overkill.
So when I saw this on Tindie, I jumped at it! It's small enough that it's light and easy to use, holds just enough paste for a short session of kitbashing, and is easy to load and clean up afterwards. It's also very affordable! I just got it a couple of days ago, and put it together in anticipation of starting a new build, and I'm very excited at the simplicity of the design.
IF there's only a couple of nits I'd pick, add to the documentation that all those vertical spaces in the syringe clip are so you can fill the syringe with a fair bit of paste, and move it inward towards the back as you use it up. It isn't absolutely intuitive, and it looks like you're just supposed to snap it in place at the rearmost slot. I figured it out, but some might need a more explicit direction. Also, I'd add one more part: a small washer, to fit between the spring and the spot on the dispenser where the spring must press against. That'd make it easier to pull back so the syringe can be popped into place, and would keep the spring from pressing directly on the plastic, maybe damaging it over time. I plan to do that with mine.
But other than that, it looks like a fantastic tool, and I plan to use it soon, now that the heatwave seems to be breaking here and I feel more amenable to working with things that melt metal.
