Well I can surmise is your soldering iron is not temperature controlled or burns butane, or you have counterfeit caps. I've resoldered that 12nF capacitor to a PCB making a real meal of it, using lots of solder, repeatedly and taking ages. Before it measured 12.14nF, after 12.15nF. Very stable still.As i said, advising pps caps to smd beginners is a bad road. Mark, next time, try to solder it by hand, to a pad with ground plane reference.
T12, quite stable controlled soldering iron. Soon to be upgraded to a better T245. I only do smd, well almost exclusively bar few trough hole if the case is better cap or higher current/voltage part.Well I can surmise is your soldering iron is not temperature controlled
That soldering job looks like two boogers out of the nostrils of a Welsh coal-miner.Well I can surmise is your soldering iron is not temperature controlled or burns butane, or you have counterfeit caps. I've resoldered that 12nF capacitor to a PCB making a real meal of it, using lots of solder, repeatedly and taking ages. Before it measured 12.14nF, after 12.15nF. Very stable still.
View attachment 1300546
So I strongly advise PPS as a surface mount film capacitor, they work really well in all my experience, perfectly suitable for beginners (if a reasonable size(!)).
Good for you. Maybe you got lucky. I've seen ceramic capacitors crack due to the heat stresses of hand soldering. The cracks are often not visible by the naked eye, but the caps disintegrate when you de-solder them with hot tweezers. Such cracks result in some really interesting circuit behaviour that's very hard to debug via email. Ask me how I know...What problems did you have? I've been using them for years and I solder them with a classic soldering iron, none of them are damaged and they all work flawlessly.
I second that recommendation. I use a toaster oven for reflow. It works very well. I keep an eye on the temperature with a K-type thermocouple thermometer and plug/unplug the oven at strategic points to get close to the prescribed reflow temperature curve.If you're trying your hand at SMT -- I would suggest purchasing a stencil for your PCB designs. This makes the application of solder paste much quicker and more efficient. You can also invest in a hot-plate for melting the solder paste once the components are placed.
I'd definitely use the larger footprints for hand-soldering. I suppose for hand-placement and oven reflow the larger footprints would make it a bit easier to place the parts, but the size difference isn't dramatic so I doubt it would make much of a difference. Unless you're really pressed for size (or weight), I don't see any drawback of the larger footprints either.If you are hand-soldering, my main advice is to make sure you have generous pads for the footprints on the pcb. If you are using Kicad there are footprints that indicate they are for hand-soldering which I think work well. I have never used an oven so have no idea whether the generous footprints make much difference in that case.