On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:33:14PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
I think I
had to resort to heating one side of the board and sucking the
solder from the other side - much easier with the board in a vise.
Isn't that how you're supposed to do it? It's certainly how I clean out
PCB holes if I need to add extra chips to a wave-soldered board.
For non-difficult vias, I typically apply heat and suction from the
same side - less juggling. I am accustomed to good results with this
technique (and can commonly recover intact parts from intact boards,
if that's the goal, like the time I extracted an IM6120 from a DecMate III
board - I wanted _both_ to survive so I could mount a socket and replace
the CPU later).
Agreed my comment was somewhat tongue-in-cheek last night. I routinely
desolder parts from a PCB (using a solder sucker and iron on the same
side) without damaging either.
But if I'm cleaning out holes to add extra parts (e.g. memory upgrades,
adding some option that wasn't presnet in my machine, whatever), then I
normally heat from the 'solder' side and scuk on the 'component' side. I
find it's easier, and more importantly involves less heating of the
board, so less risk of damage.
-tony