Hah. Just got one in the mail the other day. Yup, they work. In comparison, I have tried a desoldering gun and find myself cleaning it out as much as using it. And what PITA some of the 'new' solder is to remove!
Beware of the Chipquik branded "no clean" or "water clean up" solder. This stuff might be OK on a typical "maker board" that runs on 5 volts or less. It has produced FLAMING results on a 400+ volt tube amp circuit board. The flux that it uses is hygroscopic which absorbs moisture. A builder of one of my boards used it, washed it, then left the board in a humid garage for a few days to dry. Upon power up the board erupted into a fireworks display destroying the board and several components. I purchased the exact same solder and was able to duplicate the fireworks display. If you use this stuff, make sure that all flux residue is removed with alcohol and the board is completely dry before power up.
So that I am understanding you, you used Chipquik as a solder?
My purpose is to mix with already soldered joints and then remove the entirety of the solder that was mixed with the Chipquick product. Of course it removes easily but even after that I always would use an alcohol scrub before resoldering the joint.
I did not realize that ChipQuik sold any solder! I basically use Wonder Solder for just about everything. I am going to try the WBT silver solder though just to see what I think.
My purpose is to mix with already soldered joints and then remove the entirety of the solder that was mixed with the Chipquick product. Of course it removes easily but even after that I always would use an alcohol scrub before resoldering the joint.
I did not realize that ChipQuik sold any solder! I basically use Wonder Solder for just about everything. I am going to try the WBT silver solder though just to see what I think.
Chipquik sells all sorts of different kinds of solder. After a builder of one of my boards sent me a fried board, I found out exactly what kind of solder he used and bought the same stuff. I got it from Mouser, soldered up a test board and tested it up to 555 volts without issue. I then left the board in my garage for a week and repeated the test. The flux residue had absorbed enough moisture to smoke and fry. Damage to the board occurred in one spot.
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/tse-ii-checkout-issues-help-needed.348409/
Post #153 through 155 in this thread:
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/yet-another-sse-build-thread.349291/page-8#post-6225933
The offending solder is this:
https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/910-SMDSW.0314OZ
I presume that a good alcohol cleaning would have prevented this, but this was "no clean" solder.
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/tse-ii-checkout-issues-help-needed.348409/
Post #153 through 155 in this thread:
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/yet-another-sse-build-thread.349291/page-8#post-6225933
The offending solder is this:
https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/910-SMDSW.0314OZ
I presume that a good alcohol cleaning would have prevented this, but this was "no clean" solder.
Decaffeinated coffee, uh-huh. You can never really trust 'those guys' out there. I tried various solders to try and get to something that I might like better than Wonder solder. For whatever reason it is the one that I stick with. Out of curiosity, did the ChipQuik solder work as far as flow and brightness? I guess after your end experience, I will never know.
I just read/skimmed through the thread that you had posted. It is a head shaker when you have to question the safety of a product such as this.
And then I came upon the freon cleaning machine that I can't even comprehend existing. I worked in a small factory that made aluminum irrigation pipe. There is no way that I could spell tri-chlora-ethelyne correctly, so I won't even try. We were often up to our wrists in it cleaning pipe joints to be welded or some such thing. And that, was probably the safest thing that we did.
Way back when, I remember Costco selling 10lb. containers of R11 for $85 each. I shoulda bought a few. The stuff soon became unobtanium.
And then I came upon the freon cleaning machine that I can't even comprehend existing. I worked in a small factory that made aluminum irrigation pipe. There is no way that I could spell tri-chlora-ethelyne correctly, so I won't even try. We were often up to our wrists in it cleaning pipe joints to be welded or some such thing. And that, was probably the safest thing that we did.
Way back when, I remember Costco selling 10lb. containers of R11 for $85 each. I shoulda bought a few. The stuff soon became unobtanium.
Better yet, use the most noxious environemtally hazardous substance you can find to clean it. MEK ought to do nicely. Just to spite those b******s. 😀
I don't remember, this was 3 and a half years ago. I probably still have that solder around here somewhere but it's not in my solder box. I got a box full of assorted Alpha Metals 63/37 tin - lead solder with 1984 dates at a hamfest years ago. It works, but I'm not picky about looks though.
I worked in a Motorola plant or one of its satellite facilities for 42 years. Trichlor, yes we used it to clean the circuit boards of the HT-220 police walkie talkies that we made.......until some numm nuts put some into a styrofoam coffee cup which promptly melted spilling the stuff all over some finished walkie talkies which turned them into scrap. That was the last we saw of him and the trichlor. We got something even nastier to replace it though. MEK, don't remember having it in the plant but you could get it at Home Depot back then for stripping paint. I use good old lighter fluid (naptha) or "mineral spirits" for cleaning my DIY circuit boards. Either may remove the silk screen lettering from some commercially made boards.
The Freon "vapor phase degreaser" was just the thing for making nasty old engine parts looking brand new. My well worn Plymouth Duster with a 225 slant six fouled spark plugs with regularity. I had two sets that got rotated about once a month or so. The ugly brown ones went into the degreaser then the sandblaster, then back to the car. The freon machine had a deep tank with boiling liquid freon in the bottom. The objects to be cleaned went into a perforated bucket that you lowered into the tank but stopped above the boiling freon. At the top of the tank were some cold coils that caused the vaporized freon to condense and "rain" back down into the tank. The freon rainfall did a good job of cleaning dirty stuff. If the rain wasn't intense enough there was a jet spray wand that went from mild to full on tropical (freon) storm at a mash of a foot pedal.
Among the many things we made at the main plant was nickel cadmium battery cells. That stuff got the place on the "Federal Superfund Site Cleanup List." This led to a lot of expensive cleanup work, and the eventual sale of the facility, which is now the headquarters for Chewy, the internet pet food company. Yes, Motorola went to the dogs!
OSHA, those guys saw what we wanted them to see. For 10 years I was a Mr. Fixit for the factory. I worked in the calibration lab, so I covered all the test equipment on the evening shift. That included all sorts of neat stuff like 200 watt CO2 lasers and plasma etchers. There were other people for other responsibilities, but after all the bosses went home for the day, we had the whole plant as our playground, and we did some serious playing.
I'm a refrigeration engineer and what I read makes me jump out of my chair.
I would never have thought that a company could market such a process!
The R22 was an exceptional refrigerant as long as it was locked in its circuit but extremely dangerous outside and not only for the planet, but also for humans near it.
Just around me, I personally knew 3 refrigeration mechanics who died of it, the three from leukemia, and have a father and son.
You are one of the people (that I don't know in real life) that I really appreciate through your writings, I sincerely hope that you will never suffer the consequences of this commercial aberration in the same line as Radium toothpaste.
My experience with this machine was in the late 70's and early 80's. The hand stuffed PC board made on an assembly line full of people got replaced by SMD and automated parts placement over the course of the early 1980s.
Much to my surprise, the degreasers still exist:
https://www.techspray.com/vapor-degreasing-the-quick-guide
I don't know exactly what the solvent was, but it was made by Dupont and had the word "Freon" on the container. It was liquid at room temp and came in 5 gallon metal cans.
Fortunately for me, I only used the machine when I needed to clean something nasty. During the day shift there was an operator whose job was to run the machine daily for an 8 hour shift. The machine was at the end of a manual insertion PC board assembly line where PTH components were stuffed into a large PC board then passed over a wave solder machine and the fly cutter before hitting the vapor phase degreaser to remove the excess solder flux. The wave solder machine was another piece of extremely dangerous machinery. A stuffed PC board gets passed over a literal wave of liquid tin - lead solder after being sprayed with liquid flux. There must have been enough lead vapor in the air for the workers on that line to know to remove all gold jewelry before entering the workspace as it will eventually turn grey. The fly cutter was another scary thing when it malfunctioned. Its purpose was to cut all the wire leads on the back of the board. It would only run when the thick Lexan lid was closed since it threw chunks of PC board and parts all over the place when it went crazy.
Much to my surprise, the degreasers still exist:
https://www.techspray.com/vapor-degreasing-the-quick-guide
I don't know exactly what the solvent was, but it was made by Dupont and had the word "Freon" on the container. It was liquid at room temp and came in 5 gallon metal cans.
Fortunately for me, I only used the machine when I needed to clean something nasty. During the day shift there was an operator whose job was to run the machine daily for an 8 hour shift. The machine was at the end of a manual insertion PC board assembly line where PTH components were stuffed into a large PC board then passed over a wave solder machine and the fly cutter before hitting the vapor phase degreaser to remove the excess solder flux. The wave solder machine was another piece of extremely dangerous machinery. A stuffed PC board gets passed over a literal wave of liquid tin - lead solder after being sprayed with liquid flux. There must have been enough lead vapor in the air for the workers on that line to know to remove all gold jewelry before entering the workspace as it will eventually turn grey. The fly cutter was another scary thing when it malfunctioned. Its purpose was to cut all the wire leads on the back of the board. It would only run when the thick Lexan lid was closed since it threw chunks of PC board and parts all over the place when it went crazy.
I did this on a smaller scale to desolder 6 pin IC's, made an adapter for the pattern, i guess if you use a plumber's iron you could make a big adapter. But I have metal working machines.
The coolest guy in the factory that I worked at was the machinist that kept everything running. Just watching Victor work was a lesson in itself, and the way that his mind worked was also great. He would ask questions that no one else thought of. I didn't get to hang around him as much as I wanted, but still learned a great deal from him. There was a woman that ran a fusing welding machine for pipe collars to be fused to the pipe. So you are going from a thick cast metal and fusing it to a 20 thousandths thick pipe. Because of the steel back supporting clamp, the heat was absorbed well enough for this process to work. It rotated as the bead was made. She was very good at it until she wasn't. Then every excuse that could be made was. Bad helium gas was her favorite excuse. So for some reason, she was taken off of that station after 4 years and I was chosen to replace her. This is where Victor comes in. He worked with me to make a steadier rotation of the pipe. Because of him, the job became something simple with little adjustment needed as it did its job. It pays to listen to people like Victor, and I miss him still.
I remember one question that he gave back to the supervisor about a project. The supervisor said that he wanted this project to be perfectly square. Victor replied, "Do you want that square with the building or square with the world?" Perry, the supervisor, was stumped.
I remember one question that he gave back to the supervisor about a project. The supervisor said that he wanted this project to be perfectly square. Victor replied, "Do you want that square with the building or square with the world?" Perry, the supervisor, was stumped.
The company I just left got their circuit boards from a board house but ran the them through their own pick and place machines.
They had to use lead free solder paste to be able to sell the finished product worldwide, The water soluble flux is nasty stuff. They cleaned the
finished boards with de-ionized water.
On a lighter note I recall as a kid freezing bugs with a jug of R-12 and a hose. They always seemed to thaw and go about their business? 🤔
They had to use lead free solder paste to be able to sell the finished product worldwide, The water soluble flux is nasty stuff. They cleaned the
finished boards with de-ionized water.
On a lighter note I recall as a kid freezing bugs with a jug of R-12 and a hose. They always seemed to thaw and go about their business? 🤔
We had a quartz crystal manufacturing operation in the plant until about 1985. The "finish plating" process used a "cold trap" as part of the high vacuum gold plating and vapor deposition operation that tuned the crystal to its final frequency. The cold trap needed to be manually refilled with liquid nitrogen every few hours, so we had some serious Dewar "thermos bottles" and the equipment needed to fill them. We froze just about anything that we could think of in LN2. Pitch a frozen apple baseball style against a concrete wall and it will explode leaving virtually no trace of what it was. Fill a plastic "Nalgene" bottle about halfway with LN2, cap it and get away. The plastic will harden to a glass like material at super frozen temps and the LN2 will begin to boil raising the pressure inside the bottle. At some point the pressure will win making for a very loud and violent explosion. Note that these experiments were performed outside in the courtyard late at night when the crack security team were all at the only open door for shift change. Rapidly inverting a Dewar bottle creates a rocket exhaust style blast of quickly evaporating LN2. Since I wore flip flops to work, I did NOT do this, but some of my friends did. Note that a quick frozen mouse will not thaw out and reanimate.
ROHS was not even a dream when I worked in the factory (1973 - 1984). Lead based solder was still king. Sometime in the late 80's the Freon degreaser went away and was replaced with something that made the whole building smell like an orange juice factory. Its smell made several people sick, so that got replaced with something else that was probably worse. We were still making cell phones into the early 2000's, but the whole factory had less than 50 people and was quite clean. Last time I visited the plant (maybe 2019 or 2020) there was still a pick and place line in operation for engineering prototypes and other non production board runs. The in house PCB making line had been shut down as was the machine shop.
For the last 12 years of my career, I worked in the research lab where I made prototypes to showcase our technology. Most used an existing radio housing and PCB form factor to eliminate the mechanical design process. Sometimes we needed to make something that would not fit into an existing case.
One of the last prototypes I made was this data transceiver. It could put out about 20 watts of average LTE power in the 700 MHz band with 100 watt peaks. Everything from the CNC carved chassis to the PCB's were made in house. I left in 2014 as I saw my in house "toy shop" being shut down one piece at a time and was offered a convenient buyout.
ROHS was not even a dream when I worked in the factory (1973 - 1984). Lead based solder was still king. Sometime in the late 80's the Freon degreaser went away and was replaced with something that made the whole building smell like an orange juice factory. Its smell made several people sick, so that got replaced with something else that was probably worse. We were still making cell phones into the early 2000's, but the whole factory had less than 50 people and was quite clean. Last time I visited the plant (maybe 2019 or 2020) there was still a pick and place line in operation for engineering prototypes and other non production board runs. The in house PCB making line had been shut down as was the machine shop.
For the last 12 years of my career, I worked in the research lab where I made prototypes to showcase our technology. Most used an existing radio housing and PCB form factor to eliminate the mechanical design process. Sometimes we needed to make something that would not fit into an existing case.
One of the last prototypes I made was this data transceiver. It could put out about 20 watts of average LTE power in the 700 MHz band with 100 watt peaks. Everything from the CNC carved chassis to the PCB's were made in house. I left in 2014 as I saw my in house "toy shop" being shut down one piece at a time and was offered a convenient buyout.
Attachments
I'd try laying a length of 12-14 AWG solid copper wire along the pins and use the trick shown in the video. Why 12-14 AWG, solid? Because it's common household wiring in North America and I have plenty of scraps. A wide tip on the soldering iron will help.
I'd try that approach first before going crazy with the heat gun. It's quite easy to cook the board with a heat gun.
A solder sucker, some flux, and lots of patience would work too. Or stack the sockets like George suggested.
Tom
Even at low voltage such flux can wreck the performance in precision circuits. The DC offset of an opamp buffer can vary all over the map with water-soluble flux. That's not quite as spectacular as having the circuit explode, though. 🙂
I have some of that too. It's pretty awful. The flux residue doesn't really dry. It just leaves this gooey snot on the board that makes a mess. It does wash off under hot (60º C) water, but I certainly wouldn't call it no-clean. A friend of mine calls it SoluSlime. I think that needs to be trademarked. 🙂
If you use solder with any sort of water-soluble flux you must clean the flux off. Apparently that goes for the ChipQuik water-washable, no-clean as well.
Tom
Usually the best option with any item with pins or leads even qfp etc.
Another one - solder suckers work at their best with sufficient solder to remove. Sometimes adding more helps.
