RE: Soldering iron for IRDA chips

["Steven Dickson"<sdickson@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [ukha_d] Soldering iron for IRDA chips

Ian,

I'll ask SWMBO tonight - she repairs satellite boxes for a living and regularly replaces all sorts of weird and wonderful IC's etc.  I have a bit of experience myself from a process engineering role with Intel's PC motherboard repair centre(funnily enough where I met SWMBO), but most of the kit we used there unfortunately didn't fall into the less than £50 margin you are looking at. Where she works now doesn't have he same sort of budget so I know she uses more down to earth equipment.

My experience was that most of the experienced rework techs would use 'two' basic metcal irons simultaneously to remove allot of smt components - these had interchangeable tips - that had preset temps(mostly very fine) http://www.metcal.com/products/1.2.3.1.htm .  An alternative that was similar to what somebody else has mentioned was PACE rework centres that used various 'tweezers' type irons with IC specific tips, but these were very expensive - and the folks on the floor didn't like or use them. http://www.paceusa.com/default.asp

She does these types of IC's very quickly, almost all of the pins down on side at once, but somehow not managing to cause any shorts, running a flat tipped iron with quite a bit of solder on, then effectively removing the excess and any shorts, but I presume you probably won't want to solder these onto anything other than a breadboard that won't have the pads etc. Are the prototype boards with the correctly spaced pads etc still available for these chips?

I've seen people using hot air as well, but keep a close eye on the temps - lots of damaged IC's and lifted / damaged pads and land on PCB's with this method (it was officially banned form the floor - I kept it locked up in case of an emergency.

Mail me directly if I can be of any help or if you want to speak to SWMBO tonight - she may do a bit of a tutorial over the phone.

BTW How's the IR project with anti feedback going these days - is it ready to go - know Mark had a few difficulties with the prototype when James came over?

Steve

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian B [mailto:Ian@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 15 January 2002 08:47
To: Ukha_d
Subject: [ukha_d] Soldering iron for IRDA chips

Does anyone out there have a recommendation for a specific soldering iron
for these SSOP maxim chips recently discussed. I have looked on RS but
nothing starts until about 300 quid which is way too much. Maplin have a
temp controlled soldering station (BP53H) which is a little better priced
but there is not enough detail to tell me if it will do the job.

Ideally someone will say iron X from Y or Z at about 50 quid will do you
just nicely. Can anyone suggest such a beast.

Thanks

Ian

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