New Zealand Vintage Computer Forums

Repairing hardware can require some fairly specific equipment, and I've discovered that the equipment I've been using for doing work on the atypical through-hole vintage gear is dramatically inadequate. I'd been trying to remove what appears to be a faulty PLA from one of my Commodore 64 boards but having absolutely no luck removing the solder effectively enough to remove the chip and fear that if the chip wasn't faulty already, it definitely will be now. To that end I've ordered an Aoyue 474 vacuum desolder tool, which is a mainland chinese clone of a Hakko 474. It should arrive Wednesday.

Beyond that I've just been using my handy dandy 40W Dick Smith soldering iron that I've had for forever, and a solder pump.

What's everyone else got in their essentials boxes for working on this sort of stuff?

How much and who did you order from?

as for my self just a solder iron and desolder pump, ( plus a Eprom bower very handy when I can keep it working for OS chips etc)
When ever possible I always change to socket if I have to remove a chip, one day it will need replacing again and this way it avoids to much hacking at the board.

I ordered it via Alibaba from a firm called Scotle Technology in China. 190 including delivery, should arrive Wednesday - will give a quick review of it when it does.

I use solder wick for desoldering ICs. I find that works just fine in most cases.

Hey I got one of those Ayoye thingies, it's awesome. Took me a while to learn how to use it without pulling vias, and digging gouges in pcbs.

I'll probably do some trial runs on some kickaround dead electronics. I think I've got the CRT control board out of an iMac G3 with a blown flyback that I can experiment on before I go near anything less common

Tezza, been trying with wick. Either I've got terrible wick or I'm doing it wrong! Probably the latter to be fair.

On the solder sucker the trick is to have a good hot temp such that the solder first melts in about 2 seconds.
Place the tip on the solder and wait till you feel it melt wait a second and a bit then suck away.
After that it comes down to wiggling pins and seeing which ones are sticking trying to align them perfect centre in the holes and if that doesn't work, re-solder and de-soldering them again.
I have found on some boards a pin on each ic that is soldered with some super high temp stuff which you really need a soldering iron on super hot with some solder wick to remove.

Carcenomy wrote:I'll probably do some trial runs on some kickaround dead electronics. I think I've got the CRT control board out of an iMac G3 with a blown flyback that I can experiment on before I go near anything less common

Be careful to discharge the capacitors before working on CRT anlog boards

Carcenomy wrote:Tezza, been trying with wick. Either I've got terrible wick or I'm doing it wrong! Probably the latter to be fair.

Try adding some flux - a good wick will have lots of flux in it already but some don't work so well. I'm using these, which turned out to be Loctite branded:

http://nz.element14.com/multicore-solde ... /dp/252487
http://nz.element14.com/multicore-solde ... /dp/252499

So now I've had a play, I can say this officially.



If you intend on desoldering ICs, a desoldering station is absolutely the way to go. Even bigger ICs, you'll get the legs clear, clean and free in a matter of seconds without any undue stress.

Yeah I know, if you have the skill a solder pump will work really well, and if you have good wick it'll work really well too... but dag nabbit I'm lazy, and this thing makes the job that much easier!

Awesome, after my recent desoldering adventure I can totally see why you'd want that

"totally jelly" as they say.

But now I know where to send my boards for desoldering