Best tools to desolder DC Jack?

[WilkinsMicawber]

On the last two DC jack repairs i've attempted, I royally screwed up the operations and have had to replace the motherboards. My soldering iron, although small, doesn't seem small enough, and the desoldering iron's head is much too large. Can anyone recommend links to the best tools to perform electrical resoldering work? I don't want to spend over $50 total. Should I just use the smallest soldering iron I can find and a braid? Get a smaller desoldering gun? Any advice would be appreciated, as I'm about to run myself out of business with my fudge-ups.

 

[Ken's PC Repair]

You just can't beat a hot air rework station. I got a SMD 898D off Amazon for about $100 shipped.

I know this is double what you want to spend, but 1 job and it's paid for!

 

[WilkinsMicawber]

Do you use the hot-air part when desoldering? The benefit of that station seems mostly to be the different tips you can use.

 

[Larry Sabo]

How small (watts) is your iron? Ideally, you want something large & powerful enough to melt the solder so you can soak it up with braid or a solder-sucker tool, yet adjustable and with a finer tip so you can unsolder the fine leads through the motherboard without destroying the MB.

Did you use flux? That's important, for distributing the heat. No matter how good your iron, a hot air rework station is your best bet. I have a variety of irons, yet they are all often helpless at melting the solder when the MB soaks up so much heat because of the ground plane to which the jack is attached. Look into getting some Chip Quik low-melt solder, too. It can help.

 

[NYJimbo]

I don't want to spend over $50 total.

You might as well quit doing DC jacks right now.

 

[phaZed]

You might as well quit doing DC jacks right now.

Agreed. Stop doing them also because your not qualified and don't seem to have a grasp as to what to do. There is no excuse for broken motherboards because of a solder job.

If you want to do it, minimum cost is going to be around $160. Search the forums.

 

[MobileTechie]

You don't really want a small tip. You want to use a tip with a flat face and you want it of a decent wattage. Desoldering requires more energy than soldering and a low powered iron won't cut it.

Hot air stations can make it a breeze if you're lucky although they have their problems too. Some old solder can be hard to melt and the hot air system can end up heating up a larger proportion of the board than you'd like - to avoid nearby SMD components sliding off. I shield the rest of the board myself with multiple layers of thick foil.

Check these out

http://www.epemag.wimborne.co.uk/solderfaq.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NU2ruzyc4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z38WsZFmq8E


I recommend getting old mobos and spending some hours desoldering lots of different components off them. That's how I learned.

 

[NYJimbo]

BISMUTH - Learn it, know it, live it !

 

[Mindfulness]

I have probably done 50 of them using the following setup
http://www.amazon.com/Elenco-Electr...qid=1373755634&sr=8-3&keywords=soldering+iron

Getting the old jacks out using this setup was always stressful. It was probably not the right tool, but it was what I have always used. I would not recommend using this, but with patience it will work.

I just ordered the following(still being shipped), not sure I will use it much(not many dc jacks noadays). For the price, it is a great piece of equipment
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006FA481G/ref=oh_details_o04_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I mainly will be using it to switch rom chips on hard drives for recovery

 

[JustInspired]

I always cut the legs/pins with a fine pair of wire cutters.
Then I heat up each leg on the solder side of the board, pushing gently downwards and then use a solder brush on the other side of the board to flick the piece of leg away. Or, I use a hemostat, clipped onto the leg, hanging under the board. Melt the solder and the hemostat and piece of leg drop out.

At this point I have removed the legs entirely and I'm left with blocked holes.
I'm too slow with the solder sucker so gave up on that years ago. I use desoldering braid instead. Works brilliantly for this sort of thing. I clean the board with isopropyl alcohol and dip the braid in flux, get some fresh solder on the iron tip and get desoldering.

Now I will tell you what my greatest desoldering secret is...

Extra heat!

My Antex iron is 50 watts but have found that where the board has big copper traces, these can suck the heat away like a big heat sink. I use a halogen goose neck desk spot lamp with a 50 watt bulb in it. I let the board overhang the workbench where I'm going to desolder and adjust the lamp so it is under the board and perhaps half inch away from it. This has been very helpful for keeping the board warm enough to prevent heat sinking and allows the solder to flow and wick better. Try it and see the difference.

I have yet to get and try a hot air station for removing sockets but would like to try it sometime.

 

[ajgyomber]

Check these out

http://www.epemag.wimborne.co.uk/solderfaq.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NU2ruzyc4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z38WsZFmq8E


I recommend getting old mobos and spending some hours desoldering lots of different components off them. That's how I learned.

Thanks for these videos. Very informative.

--AJ

 

[damitman]

this cheap tool from radio shack is the way to go, for a dc jack it can`t get any easier. watch some u-tube vids on this tool and practice on some old mobo`s. this tool makes removing caps and jacks a cake walk, but you have to practice, putting the cap or jack back in, correctly, is the hard part. again, watch some vids, get some old pcb boards and practice on them, de-soldering and soldering is a learned skill, (you learn by doing) then do them for money

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2062731

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBngvmpNe5A

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWDpRlGwF_4

these 2 will get you started, good luck

 

[Mindfulness]

what type of flux to you guys recommend?

 

[Larry Sabo]

I use rosin flux for general repairs, and clean up the residue with SuperWash or IPA.

 

[ComputerPro]

We have a hot air rework station but sometimes removing them is still a pain. We partnered up with a local electronics repair shop that solders all day long. For 15-20 bucks we just give most to them unless we are slow. We prob do 10-20 a month so it's a win / win for both of us. They always do a super professional job as that's all they do.

The newer Toshibas with the motherboard mounted upside down on the back plate are great! Wish they all were like that lol. Couple screws and bam, access to everything.

 

[Mindfulness]

prob do 10-20 a month so it's a win / win for both of us.

Dc jacks are just a fraction of a percent of our total volume. Either you guys do an abnormally high percentage of dc jacks or have some insane total volume

 

[ComputerPro]

@mindfullness
We do seem to do quite a few of those lol. We aren't that big of a shop but we are high volume for our area. We seem to have between 30-40 systems in the shop at all times, plus onsites which are mostly our business clients. Power jack repairs seem to come in waves. The bulk of our repairs are the normal stuff, virus removal, software issues, hardware stuff etc.
In our case partnering up makes sense. We usually flat rate the power jack repairs at $129 which includes the jack. So we are still profiting about $100 bucks for basically taking a laptop apart and reassembling it. The electronics shop is down the road from our shop so its great.
Funny thing is they do a few themselves and charge $200 for it lol.

 

[brandonkick]

Last night I did some pinball repair work on my second job...


Had a board that needed a few connectors replaced, as the pins were burned and the connections were bad. So I had to desolder three different connectors (one 7 pin, one 10 pin and one 9 pin) and solder in new pins.

I was working with my Yihua 936 clone soldering station, a solder sucker and some 60/40 radio shack solder.

Desoldering the pins went fairly well and would have actually been a breeze had the last person who tried to "fix" the board would have done it properly. They used so much heat that they lifted a few pads, and ended up bridging to adjacent pins to take care of their mistake. All of these pins were putting out the same 6.4V AC so it didn't "matter" but their poor work caused pads to lift which made desoldering that connector much much harder. Especially because they used an ungoldy amount of solder. Even with my machine cranked, it took a good 30 seconds of heating to melt that solder blob.


The one's that must have burned after they fixed the board weren't bad and since they didn't do a bad repair I was able to easily desolder and resolder the new pins in without any trouble. Unfortunately their shoddy work did the board in... I could have probably got it to work by soldering from the traces to the pins directly but I decided we are better off to replace the board with a new one.

Where do you guys get your DC jacks from?

Anyone ever done any ethernet port replacements?

 

[tlaybourn]

I can't agree that you need to spend lots to do DC jacks.

My method is the same as JustInspired:

Break out the jack plastic and metal surround with a pair of fine cutters, leaving only the "legs".
Melt the solder on each leg and pull each leg out one by one using the fine cutters as pliers. This is important, as the next step does not work properly unless the leg is removed.
Now use a solder sucker to clear each pad one by one, it may help to heat one side and suck the other.

I found I needed at least a 50W iron. I am also using leaded solder (but I don't have any unleaded).

I will say I haven't seen a hot air tool in use except on YouTube but they all seem to emphasise getting the jack out in one which I do not think is necessary seeing how cheap they are.

 

[MobileTechie]

They're not trying to get the socket out in one to save money, it's just they way hot air works. When it works well it's a beautiful thing - the socket just drops off the board leaving shiny clean holes. However it doesn't always work like that.