People have an irrational fear of surface mount soldering. I know I did at first. If you are a whiz with a pencil iron, you should be able to do surface mount with a little practice. I used to routinely replace 100 pin QFPs here at work with a wide chisel tip soldering iron (about 1/4" long tip). Removing them safely is much harder without a hot air soldering station, but the soldering itself is relatively easy. The trick is using plenty of flux and not too much solder (fine rosin core works best). If the pins aren't too fine a pitch you can simply start with a bead of solder on one row of pins and drag it across all the pins and surface tension will do the rest. Sometimes you get bridging between adjacent pins if you put too much solder on... to handle this I place the chisel across adjacent pins and sweep quickly from the knee of the legs away from the part. You might also need more flux if this happens a lot. If that doesn't work, I use the desoldering station, but I would think solder braid would also work. Again, flux is the main key to doing this right (we use flux pens for this work). Afterwards you can use a brush with a little rubbing alcohol to clean the flux off. I wouldn't recommend this with a non-temp controlled iron, but temp controlled irons are pretty cheap these days. Takes me about 5 minutes or so with the aforementioned 100 pin chip now. two sided parts like caps and resistors are a breeze using the technique you mention. ________________________________ From: Jeff Walther <trag at io.com> To: cctech at classiccmp.org Sent: Thu, December 3, 2009 1:59:47 PM Subject: Re: Leaky caps [Was: Re: vintage components] The surface mount electrolytics aren't bad at all. You should be able to manage with reading glasses. To remove the old ones, just get two soldering pencils. Heat controlled is nice, but you can use a pair of Radio Shack 15watt grounded pencils (>$10 ea. last time I checked). Apply one pencil to each side of the capacitor until it lifts easily off of the board. Do not pry. Remove the old solder with a bit of desoldering braid. Clean the pads with your favorite solvent(s). Lightly tin one pad. Position the new capacitor on the pads and hold in place by pressing down with a flat blade screwdriver or similar (pencil eraser at end of pencil might work well). Heat the tinned side until the capacitor sinks flat on the pad. Remove heat, then remove screwdriver. Solder the other terminal normally. In the old Macintosh world we've been replacing the SM electrolytics with SM tantalums in hopes that they will last longer. Anyway, this may not be best practice, but it gets the job done for about $20 in equipment (two soldering pencils) and less than $10 in supplies (solder, flux, braid). Jeff Walther