Cleaning old built up flux residues from reflow oven

If you do a search on Reflow Oven Cleaning Fluid, you will find links to companies and chemicals that can assist you. I recommend that you contact one or more of the companies and discuss your needs and the paste you are using. They should be able to help you procure a cleaning agent for your oven. Vacuum out what is crystalized and scrape out what is not solidified before you go in with the chemicals. Expect it to take time and elbow grease to get your machine clean. You can probably get most of the contamination out, but not all of it.

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So, someone is going to get a chance to buy a nice and shiny oven, eh? Summary from my notes of old thread on SMTnet: Some people melt sugar and use that solution to clean cooked-on flux residue. Dissolve sugar into warm water, spray it on the area that you want to clean, let it work for a short while and then rub the muck off. If you want to do it the manual way: Just wet the surface, take a lump of sugar and rub, it won´t scratch aluminium but it´ll remove all the burnt-in flux. This works and the sugar left behind just rinses off with water. It works a lot better than the solvents we have. Try using Sprite instead of the hassle of melting sugar. Coke leaves a black stain.

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