Desoldering?

[MD Willington]

I like the ghetto solder sucker there...I suppose a shopvac could be rigged up to do the same, the only thing is that moving a lot of air across the heated area will cool it down pretty quick.

MD

[mcel]

Whatever you do, don't use a drill to clear out holes, even if you think it's smaller. These are multilayer boards with internal planes, for at least ground and +V, in addition to the tracks you can see on each side. The holes are plated through and arranged to make contact where necessary with the internal tracks. Drilling could destroy these connections.
Mike

[kc8adu]

i watched an idiot drill solder out of a board with an isotip pc drill attachment.
warned him that if the slightest bit off center he would damage the throughholes.he did it anyway rather than having me take the board home and doing it right.
after his "repair" the board had several new problems.
took me 5 hours of rework to fix that mess.
he had spun out the throughholes in 9 places and soldered heavy enough to hide them.
customer fired the idiot on the spot when i told the boss what their resident "tech" had done.
mitsubishi wanted 3k for that board.
and they had payed 9k for the machine(wire edm) knowing it had issues.

Originally Posted by mcel

Whatever you do, don't use a drill to clear out holes, even if you think it's smaller. These are multilayer boards with internal planes, for at least ground and +V, in addition to the tracks you can see on each side. The holes are plated through and arranged to make contact where necessary with the internal tracks. Drilling could destroy these connections.
Mike

[stretch0069]

Someone PM'd me about drilling out the holes. I said it was a bad idea. He/she did it anyway (I guess) and tried converting me to drilling as well! Oh well. Some people.

I realize that not everyone has access to a good soldering/desoldering station or the money to buy one, but I have access to an old (at least 10 years) Pace PPS-200C. So far I've replaced two sets of caps and a ZIF socket. It worked awesome. No problems getting the holes clear. If only I had one two years ago.

Yes....I said ZIF. Ok....I was bored and didn't have anything new to calculate (see 'ton of caps' )

[mcel]

Back in my mainframe computer development days, hundreds of years ago, we were pretty proud we'd reached a 12 layer central processor backplane. But I see manufacturers now talk of 20 or more layers... Now on that sort of board, you really don't want to mess with the plated thru holes!