Recommendation for Tools for Cap Replacement

[Jonny Accelerant]

I plan on doing this as a long-term hobby at least, and possibly as a serious business, so I'm planning on which tools to buy, and looking for advice.

At this point, I've decided to buy the visor-style magnifiers instead of a large magnifying lense. And also I'm going to need some way to clamp the PC boards during desoldering and resoldering.

Main question though is what is the best method of desoldering? Back in the military we had soldering irons that had a squeeze bulb thing that would vacuum up the melted solder.

Also I've seen a few YouTube videos where they are using heat guns to solder. I can see several ways in which that can be a problem, but would like to hear from people that have actually done it.

Finally, I'm a tool-using guy, and over the years I've learned that the right tool can turn an unpleasant chore into something fun, and I am always interested in hearing about other people's favorite tools, so if there is something super cool I'd like to hear about it, because I might buy it.

For example, I need some way of measuring the bad caps so I can order replacements. This think is available at Home Depot for $30.00. Good buy?

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Stalwart-...wASw&gclsrc=ds

[mariushm]

Re: Recommendation for Tools for Cap Replacement

Dude, the capacitors are standard sizes most of the time. The most common sizes are 8mm, 10mm and 12.5 mm in diameter.
The lead pitch is 3.5mm, 5mm, or some value in multiples of 0.1"

You don't really need a such a tool to determine the diameter, a simple ruler with mm and cm gradations would be enough.

In addition, you can just read the manufacturer and series from the capacitor and look up the dimensions in the datasheet. Now granted, sometimes there are custom batches or custom series of capacitors that don't match with the diameter and height listed in the datasheet, but then you can always fall back on the classic ruler.

Now anyway, if you have some money laying around, they're a good tool to have around, for example to measure wire diameter, insulation diameter, thickness of some heatsink or some sheet of metal and so on. But fuck Homedepot, $30 is a lot of money for a tool that you can buy for a few dollars on eBay (and I guarantee it, it's just a rebranded chinese thing anyway).

Here's a $17 one on Amazon.com : https://www.amazon.com/Neiko-01407A-...SIN=B000GSLKIW

If you look around you can find noname ones for under $10... giving you the above because it's reviewed and rated well.

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Soldering and desoldering questions..

The BEST tool you can ever have is a good iron that can heat up and hold enough heat to turn the solder into something liquid quick. A good soldering station makes a HUGE difference.
If you're still using cheap soldering irons and you do repairs from time to time, buying a proper soldering station is definitely worth it. Look for a Hakko fx-888 or something similar, a soldering station that has temperature sensor and allows you to adjust the temperature.

With monitor power supplies and computer power supplies and other simple circuit boards, the easiest way is to simply add some solder to the joint, heat up the area with the soldering iron and then use a classic cheap desoldering pump to suck the solder away.
These circuit boards have wide traces, large holes, they're easy to work with.

With motherboards or circuit boards that have several layers and potentially big copper surfaces and small hole pads and thin leads, it can be hard to keep the solder liquid because all that copper pulls heat away.
That's where some people find it easy to use a hot air gun to warm up the circuit board in that area and keep it at a warm temperature, and then the soldering iron has a less difficult time to turn the solder liquid.
Of course, hot air gun can be very good if you need to solder some surface mount components in an area of the circuit board that's heavily populated with large parts (that make it hard to maneuver the soldering iron around).
In that case, you can put a layer of aluminum foil over the soldered parts (to act like a heat "repellant" or heatsink) and then a hot air gun can be used to solder just that component to the board.

Some people also swear by soldering wick, but I'm one of the guys that don't like to use it. First of all, pretty much all the cheap wicks are of poor quality, without or with too little flux, which makes it very cumbersome to actually desolder stuff.

Good quality wick is expensive and imho, not worth it. If you repair stuff often and use wick often, it can actually be cheaper to buy a proper desoldering gun, like hakko fr-300 (which replaces the fx-808)