Iggy, years ago, I got a broken Pace de-soldering handpiece. I repaired the broken top ( a couple of small L brackets). So there I was a de-soldering gun with no vacuum source. The thrift shops came to my rescue. I found a daisy seal a meal. A little bit of fish tank air tubing, a foot switch and a standard light dimmer, all fashioned together in a box (
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) and I have a temp adjustable de-soldering system that works great. I did have to buy tips about 2 years ago, but I bought ten on ebay and that should last forever. I little hint, if you take out the tip and reverse it, the other end has a bigger end!!!!
I added a couple of other things to the box, but what your looking at is the top part, handset, timer (cause I am old and forget things) and light dimmer. The rest of the stuff is for the variacts at the bottom.
Not at all, you hold it in your hand with your thumb on the bulb, it's really easy to use. I'd rather have a vacuum operated desoldering station but this fits in my toolbox. Only real trick is to keep a fresh tip on it, when they wear out they don't get a good seal.
None of those little solder suckers compare to a real properly functioning desoldering station. When I spent a summer working at a fiends stereo repair shop we had the Hako deoldering stations and I could desolder blown output modules faster than you could even uncoil your solder wick.
I've also noticed that I often need to add solder to make a second try at unsoldering a component lead if the solder sucker didn't get everything on the first try. I theorize (but can't prove) that the extra solder is sometimes necessary to carry heat all the way down into the plated-through hole, to melt the solder all the way through the hole.
If the component that's being removed has nice fat copper leads, those can carry heat pretty well (assuming you can make good enough contact between the iron tip and the lead). But IC leads don't seem to be terribly good heat conductors. A nice bit of liquid solder does a better job of conducting heat from the iron tip down into the PCB hole.
I don't think anyone who's used one can argue against it being the superior choice, but wick and other methods have their place, they fit comfortably in a small portable toolbox.
Just a little update. I found a certain adjustment that I adjusted and the vacuum increased very substantially. I think that this station is perfectly usable now as it is.
That's probably true, but there's also a lot of amalgamation going on. That's why copper soldering iron tips get pitted from solder; it amalgamates with the copper. Notice that the pasty glop on a soldering iron that isn't continuously re-tinned (or that has an iron-plated tip) has a higher melting temp. When you wipe the glop off and re-tin, it runs a lot easier. The same is true in a soldered joint.
No, these things (at least with the right handpiece, like the SX70) can remove an INCREDIBLE amount of solder in one slurp. Remember, companies won't pay $2500 for something like this if it didn't actually work. One nice thing about this sort of unit is it has a temperature-controlled heater with temperature readout of the tip, and the heating tip is also the sucker, so you don't have to switch quickly from soldering iron to sucker before the joint cools. Another nice thing about the high-end Pace and Weller gear is that individual replacement parts are available, so you can replace any single piece that wears out or breaks.
Iggy wasn't replacing a high-power switch, but an electronic switch on the control circuit board.
Those Soldapullt things are a JOKE compared to a Pace dsoldering system.
I routinely salvage some expensive 68 pin through-hole connectors on 6-layer boards. I can just barely tell which pins are connected to the ground plane and which aren't when using the Pace. With a soldering iron and a soldapullt I would never be able to desolder one of those ground pins, the solder would freeze before I could get the soldapullt on it.
Bet you didn't pay for the desoldering station, though.
Wick is my go-to for surfacemount, the Soldapullt for thru-hole and terminals. If production were an issue, revenue would buy best-available tools. These get 'er done for me.
It was a larger-than-microscopic thru-hole component on a fairly low-tech board, was it not? I've not seen anything in a Miller welder that looks much like the innards of a cellphone...
I certainly won't refute your good experience with the $2500 tool ... but if you didn't have the $2500 tool available to you then you might benefit from a Soldapullt lesson by a technician who is proficient with one.
I also doubt that repair of circuit boards in Miller Welders is strongly comparable to the rather more sophisticated and challenging work you do with 68-pin connectors on 6-layer boards.
In fact, this is what I like about these boards, they are 1) very low tech and 2) easy to repair due to good part placement 3) easy to identify components, which look mostly off the shelf.
My repair was, obviously, the most trivial kind, but I appreciated repairability of these boards.
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