Re: Is it my soldering equipment too or just me?

That's exactly what mine looks like, but mine has a plastic top half.

I suppose cheap plastic tools are more of a risk to eyes than boiling flux/flux fumes. lol.

Re: Is it my soldering equipment too or just me?

On my radio shack one...I have lost the manual and there is not one online. Anyone else have one of them and know how to get at the back end of it to check the seals there? (Previous sentence added after the rest of the post was typed. I decided to give it a hard twist because 'what they hey, it's broken already' and pop! I still can't figure out how to get the tip out of it though.)

I think mine may have been DOA, as it is pre-lubed and still has this issue. I'm thinking I'm just going to replace it with something else....

Re: Is it my soldering equipment too or just me?

The "O" ring does not appear to be creating a seal on the sucker, now that I examine it. Shifting it around and tightening/retightening it is not doing the trick. Just so I don't accidentally set something on fire, grease what, where, and what with?


With the iron, I have a sponge and then a metal scouring pad to clean it off with. I did buy a new tip to replace the original one but I haven't put it on yet. I really am running down to the wire here, and before my monitor broke I was financially chewing...

Re: Is it my soldering equipment too or just me?

It might be that this iron is enough for the monitor board, but back when I was working these LEDs off of one of those cheap 3xtriple A battery LED flashlights, it was arduous there too. I need to be able to practice successfully a bit before I take it to something mission critical.

I expected the board to start turning funny colors after I had it on it for a good 15 seconds trying to get the area heated up so I could slip the darn solder sucker in and get something from it. Not quite. I suppose this says that Intel's...

Re: Is it my soldering equipment too or just me?

It's going to be used on a monitor power board, I just grabbed the modem to practice my technique and not worry about burnt PCB. Good news was I didn't burn the PCB. Bad news was at the end I tried to burn the PCB. It's worked fine to stick wires together and attach things to button/switch terminals, but man it's not shining here.

I'll look at getting a stainless steel dental pick. I've wanted one for awhile to fetch the pesky screws that fall under and behind a motherboard in a case, along with a mirror-on-a-pole. (It...

Okay, so I have a dead monitor and am still juggling having it repaired versus doing it myself. I decided a pivotal moment between DIY and sending it in would be if I could desolder components from a PCB quickly and successfully ( no visible damage ).

So I broke out my setup, collected several years ago via Christmas presents to venture into case modding:

Radio shack 25W pen iron
Radio shack solder sucker, [url]http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2062745[/url]
and a set of helping hands, [url]http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3928375[/url]...

Re: Samsung Syncmaster 225BW

Sorry about the images, I am not seeing my edit button. I think the 'new member' group is preventing me from getting to the post.

Thanks guys, this helps a lot. Yes these are the proper caps for my monitor. I'm assuming out loud so you guys can correct me that the white stripe with the dashes through it signify negative polarity? (In the pictures, they're the sides of the capacitor mounts with the thicker line at the bottom)

Any advice on desoldering wick? [url]http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Cat=1311239&k=wick[/url]...

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hello all!

I'm a solder-phobic, code-a-phobic computer geek currently in an institution meant to remediate the latter phobia offering varying degrees ( 2 years at current institution, transferring to 4 and 6 year in the near future ) of remediation.

Found this forum via google when my monitor died. Figured "Hey, good info here, might as well jump in and work on my former phobia."

Re: Samsung Syncmaster 225BW

Hey guys,

So I was about to pull the trigger on an ebay auction for a set of caps to try to repair my 225BW, [url]http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220620131178&ssPageName=ADME:X:RTQ:US:1123[/url] , I've been working on this on another forum, [url]http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?p=4497427[/url]

I'm a novice with a soldering iron, but I'm hesitant about getting bad caps. I'm a bit inundated with information at the moment. Should I bother ordering from this guy on ebay? If not, where and could someone...