The hot-air conundrum

[profezzorn]

I agree, Adafruit is well worth supporting.
They aren’t always cheap though, and there is a limit to how much extra I’m willing to pay just because I like the seller.

[Bobby_Susenbach]

I need one and I will check it out.

[Afrojedi]

yeah, i’m still needing to build those sabers.

[Afrojedi]

So the soldering station is hakko and the hot air rework station is atten st-862D cool. Wife promised me if i complete my Red hat certification she’ll get me these.

Can anyone suggest a good desoldering gun? The sucker ones are just too finicky for me.

[profezzorn]

The Desoldering Decision

So we all know about soldering equipment, right? If not, there are some threads about that. But what about de-soldering? We’ve all done that at some point or another, and if the thing you’re de-soldering has more than one leg/pad/pin, it can be kind of difficult… I recently wanted to replace the joysticks in some of my PS5 controllers, and those little buggers have 14 legs, so de-soldering them was not easy. For the first joystick, I went at this with the tools I have, which are: This is an excellent solder sucker btw, highly recommended. And: Which I don’t use that much. However, de-soldering the joystick took a long time. I was never able to get the legs completely solder free, so I had to essentially pull on the joystick, melt the solder at one leg at a time, and then wiggle wiggle until the joystick eventually came free. Took a very long time to do. Before I tackled the second PS5 controller, I decided to do some research on ways and means to do de-soldering, and I ended up buying two things: and: And I have to say that both of these have been excellent. First I used the Hakko desoldering tool, which makes it really easy to get rid of most of the solder, but the joystick is still stuck in the small amount of solder that is left. Then I used the chip removal allow, which has a really low melting point, so it’s really easy to keep all 14 points hot enough to stay molten while you remove the joystick. Then you just use the desoldering tool to remove the remaining alloy. Super easy! Now, the desoldering tool is a bit of a luxury at $315, and you can do the same thing with a regular solder sucker, so I don’t know if I recommend that unless you have some money to burn. Of course, I also didn’t pay full price for mine… It turns out that you can buy it for almost half the price on Ebay directly from Japan. Allegedly, the Japan version is a lower wattage and meant for 100 volts instead of 120 volts, but a lot of people seem convinced that they are in fact the same tool, and using the Japanese version in the US should just work. (That is what I’m doing, but please do not blame if it doesn’t work for you.) Anyways, I highly recommend the chip removal alloy is for de-soldering things with many legs/pads, and it’s very reasonable priced.

[profezzorn]

Now if you want to save a few bucks, I would probably recommend buying the japanese version of the desoldering gun from ebay, and you can get third-party soldering stations that accepts the same tips as the soldering station I use. The tips are the important part IMHO, so saving some money on the soldering station is probably fine.

Finally, if you really want to up your soldering game, consider a microscope:

The Magnification Observation

I’ve soldered for a long time, but I wasn’t always good at it. Better equipment, solder and practice has made me better of course, but good magnification is an instant level up in your soldering skills. Finding good magnification can be a challenge though. Here are the things I’ve tried: Small desk magnifier This thing did work, but just barely. The magnifying glass doesn’t provide enough magnification, the light is weak and the optical quality is not great. Not recommended. Large desk magnifier This worked better, and I still use this for some things, but not for soldering. For soldering you really want something that provides a good stereoscopic view, and looking with both eyes through a single magnifying glass tends to not work that well. The first stereo microscope This is a gigantic step up from the desk magnifiers above. It’s also a big step up in price unfortunately. Soldering with one of these lets you see exactly what you’re doing. The base is magnetic, so you can attach helping hands to it, and I used to velcro my brass soldering cleaning sponge to it. I highly recommend using something like this when soldering. The second stereo microscope After my first run of proffieboards, I decided to upgrade some of my equipment, so I bought the best stereo microscope I could find. While it is definitely better than the one above, and having a camera on it is very handy at times, it is much more expensive than the microscope above. So I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have cash to burn. The difference while actually using this and the one above is just not enough to warrant the high cost. Things I haven’t tried Head-mounted magnification is cheap and seems to work well for a lot of people. There are a lot of versions of this, I just linked one that looks what I have seen recommended elsewhere.

[Afrojedi]

@profezzorn

Now if you want to save a few bucks, I would probably recommend buying the japanese version

This won’t work, 240V here in Australia.

[profezzorn]

@profezzorn

Anyways, first impressions are good, and if I’m still using it a year from now, I will give it my stamp of approval.

ATTEN ST-862D Follow-up:

Still using it
Still like it
Stamp of approval

[Afrojedi]

A video on smd soldering would be AMAZEBALLS

[profezzorn]

There is thousands of those on youtube.

[Afrojedi]

Yeah but none of them are proffieboard specific and none of them are you with hints and tips you can provide.

[profezzorn]

Most of them are probably better than me.
I can do it, but I don’t do enough of it to be an expert at it.

my hints and tips:

• Use magnification of some sort
• get some tweezers
• don’t turn the heat up too much
• use the lowest air flow setting you can
• consider using kapton tape to cover up other parts so they don’t move around. (Although I’m usually too lazy to do that.)

[Afrojedi]

I think that this youtube has some great tips. Do you think pcb way might be able to make a stainless steel stencil as seen in this video?

SMD Soldering Tutorial | Guide | Tools | Tecniques | Stencil

[profezzorn]

Stencils are really only useful when your board doesn’t have any components on it.
I usually use oshstencils when I need stencils.

[Afrojedi]

Sounds great.

[Afrojedi]

the atten is actually hard to come by in some markets it’s discontinued (e.g. Australia) so here’s a place you can still get it.

Atten ST-862D Hot Air Rework Station 120VAC-New

any thoughts on this?

ATTEN ST-8802 2 In 1 Rework Station Soldering station hot air station 65/800 W...

[profezzorn]

@Afrojedi

any thoughts on this?

ATTEN ST-8802 2 In 1 Rework Station Soldering station hot air station 65/800 W : Amazon.com.au: Home Improvement

That looks like a standard blower-in-handle station. I’m not sure if all blower-in-handle stations are the same, but they sure seem to use exactly the same design for the handle. I would expect it to perform the same as my Smartxchoices 898D+ which I wrote a paragraph about earlier in this thread.