Desoldering

The three most common inexpensive ways to remove solder include a “solder sucker”, solder wick, and an iron with an attached desoldering bulb.

Desoldering tools

 

 

Surface mount desoldering: Surface mount chips are especially hard to desolder because it’s very difficult to completely remove all the solder pin by pin, and avoid overheating the board and lifting a pad. Professional shops use expensive hot air guns or special tips (shown below) to heat all the joints at once.

Desoldering a SOIC

There are fortunately a few cheap ways to desolder surface mount chips.

  • ChipQuik provides an interesting solder that when melted over existing joints produces a new low-melting point alloy (under 200 °F) with a much longer solidification time. The longer solidification time enables you to melt all the joints at once and then flick off the chip.
  • There are many guides for making a DIY hot air gun with the RadioShack® desoldering iron and a fish tank air pump. Engadget has one of the better how-to guidesHere and here are some more plus the supposed original.
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CuriousInventor launched in late 2006 (pre-arduino era!) as a place to enable hobbyists, students, and musicians to create their own technology. We sold open-source kits and tools, and offered numerous guides & videos on things like soldering, metal working, screws, electronics, and more. 

The store is now mostly empty, but we’ve kept the product pages and guides up since they have useful information. Many of our guides and videos still rank on the first page of google searches and have been seen millions of times. Content on this site and the CuriousInventor YouTube channel produced by Scott Driscoll.

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