Paul | May 30, 2014

Most of the needles worked great. Don't buy the assortment.

For Precision Dispensing Needles

I purchased and tried

-Type-5 leaded paste

-Type-5 low temp paste

-Needle assortment kit



The 25 and 23 ga needles worked fine. The 25ga is great for 0.5mm to 2mm pitch parts. The 23ga is faster for 1mm to 2mm pitch stuff. Large SMT parts I found were faster without the press and just using the syringe cap with a hole in it. Smaller than 0.5mm pitch is possible, but you run the risk of shorts and balls. Anything smaller than 0.9mm pitch, I recommend magnification when applying it.



When using these needles it was fairly easy to set the flow rate with the paste press. The flow didn't stop, but that's an issue with the paste press and not these needles.



The 27ga needle was too small for even this Type-5 paste. The paste's ball size is small, but not small enough for this size needle. If you get it to flow through the 27 or 30 ga needles, you have different paste than I did. I tried all five 27ga needles with everything from cold, warm and hot paste. The paste was fresh, the press was new. Neither the leaded or lead-free-low-temp stuff would flow. I nearly cracked the syringe trying to get it to flow.



Do yourself a favor and just by the 23 and 25ga needles separate.



To clean the paste out of the needles, stand them upright in 90% isopropyl alcohol using a pen cap or something like that. Tape the pen cap to something with a little bit of vibration and come back in an hour. You might need to replace the alcohol once if the needle 'just' fit in the pen cap. I taped mine to my PC case...the fan is old.



I was able to use the 27ga needles to dispense epoxy (one time use here), but they worked great in this application.



Overall I'm happy with the press, paste and 25ga/23ga needles. The 27ga needles were a disappointment, but I found they were not needed anyway and it was only a couple bucks. No worries.