5 Aug
2004
5 Aug
'04
7:08 a.m.
The only problem with working on surface mount stuff
is that people think
it's hard. It's not.
Correct, SMD stuff is not that "impassable" just takes lot of care
and steady hands. Med or fine tip with temperate controlled solder
iron, lot of quality flux in a tube, wick and best quality solder.
As for special tools, yes, a hot-air soldering tool is
useful (but one of
those butane-powered irons with the hot air tip is OK for repairs). But I
just used a normal soldering iron with the finest bit made, and take a
little care. I've done PQFPs, SOICs, transistors, passives, etc with no
problem at all.
I have done some small diffcult to remove SMD (especially dual inline
SOJ) taken off with hot air gun like memory IC off the SIMMs or off
the motherboard.
Now BGAs are a problem (I wonder what the cheapest
setup for doing those
is -- I've seen a protoryping rig, but it's about \pounds 5000). But
components where you can get to each individual connection are no trouble
at all.
Somebody who had success with BGA and hot air gun, I find I couldn't
melt all the solder if the gullwing style IC is larger than .5"
square because of heat conduction became too much to keep all the
solder molten.
So I'm curious how you got around to to get all the balls on the
BGA melted with that? Also not blowing the BGA off like leaf in a
wind?
Cheers,
Wizard
-tony