Where to rent a SMT de-soldering station?

[tINY]

If you have a good soldering station, you can get the right tip for about $20. Use a bit of solder and heat up the leads, take the part off with a pair of tweezers and clean the whole thing up with some desoldering braid.

No fancy stations needed (unless you have 100's of parts to remove).



-tINY

[jdunn]

Tiny - Thanks for the reply. Yeah, Jim uses a Hako soldering station. I'm pretty sure you can get the correct tip for this use. I did read a few papers online that explained different ways to de-solder surface mount w/o anything too fancy. There's some type of compound that is sometimes used. Jim has it already, so that may work.

[Edit] I just talked to Jim about this. He says that getting the parts out isn't his main concern. The trick will be getting the new ones into the rather 'tiny' (pun) surface mount hole pin-out on the circuit board. It's been a few years since we originally started on this project, so I'm just going to bring the kit to Jim this week and he'll see if he can get it done.

I'll post here in a few weeks to let you know how it came out.

[dasbin]

Originally posted by jdunn
The trick will be getting the new ones into the rather 'tiny' (pun) surface mount hole pin-out on the circuit board.

Yeah. Most times I've attempted to do anything like this, it's ended in failure. Getting them off is easy, but you tend to end up pulling/destroying a few of the PCB traces in the process. I've gotten it right a couple times, but it's more luck than anything. Replacing SMD chips is a huge gamble and you risk rendering the whole thing unusable.
Also you'd better be damn sure that you're not going to need to put the original part back in. I've replaced SMD parts with newer versions that were supposedly 100% pin-compatible. Oops, they just didn't work in that particular configuration for whatever reason. But the old part is as good as destroyed once you pull it.

EDIT - if we're just talking SMD resistors or capacitors here, they're a lot easier. I wouldn't worry too much about doing that, though you should still be really careful and slow when you do it. IC's are the hard part.

[jdunn]

Dasbin, thanks for your post. Actually, we're not even talking about SMT resistors and capacitors, but the traditional through-hole kind, such as WIMA caps and Nichicon electrolytic caps, etc...

Here's a photo of the right DAC board.

[jdunn]

Ane here's the bottom of the same board.

[dasbin]

Ah! so easy then. nothing on that board is surface-mount. any soldering iron will take any of that stuff off.


If you're talking about the 8-pin DIP chips that are soldered right to the board, it's usually easiest to just take a small pair of clippers and chop the legs off, then just solder the new one onto the legs.

[jdunn]

Okay, that's encouraging. Hopefully it will come out alright then. Maybe we're past the phase where we needed the SMT puller. We did send the boards up to the people who built them to pull a few op amps already. So the op amps have been done, though Jim does have a newer one now. The one with the little chip piggy-backed on it will probably be updated with his newer ones.

I think at this point we want to remove some of those red and green WIMA caps and replace them w/ higher value ones, and perhaps change some of the electrolytics and resistors, etc...

This should be a great sounding DAC once we're finished building it. It uses dual Burr Brown PCM 1704 K-Grade DAC chips per channel in a correlation techinque, and the filtering is supposed to be excellent.