Soldering small

Looks awesome and good idea to use a unique color.

The smallest soldering for me happened when I was fixing my son's MP3 player. It would not power up.

I took the player apart and found the issue (which was not obvious prior to taking it apart). What broke was the on/off switch. It was soldered and fell off due to inadequate support.

Soldering it back on was a challenge for me, but it did work out.

i

...

That looks like it will work fine, but for your other SO-8 packages, note that that the 0.050" lead spacing of SO-8 matches the 0.050 card edge pin spacing on PCI cards. If you have any old PCI interface cards sitting around, you can cut off sections of card edge to use as PCB's for making prototypes. (Of course, if not in a hurry, you can have a real $13 PCB made via .)

Nice job! I know I've lost a lot of my ability to do really small stuff. I did solder some cracked surface mount ICs on a Dell laptop, a well documented problem. Now I've accumulated a bunch of optics and mechanical helpers for fine work. I really like my $50 200 power zoom lighted still/video microscope!

I'm contemplating a fix for a Toshiba laptop video card that has ball array mounted memory chips that need repair...no replacement cards available. I'll build a dam on each chip and fill it with molten lead from my lead pot. What do I make the dam from? What temp should the lead be to fix the array yet not fry the chips?

"$8.00/sq. in. for 4 layer designs"

Bless you, James!

--Winston

Do you have a link to your $50 200 power zoom lighted still/video microscope!

Mike

I am not sure of the temp, but in the industry hot air is used to apply or reflow those, and a fixture holds the chip up off the circuit board so that it's weight does not squish all the solder balls into one massive solder short. Duration of heat application is also critical, to not get either cold solder or overcooked, this is all done with a huge machine with special fixtures for each board and chip used, copper chills on the back, computer timed and regulated airflow, and to move the chip that last mm into contact at the exact right moment. If it was made with lead-free solder, it is even fussier about process parameters. I'd suggest finding another video card on eBay except I suspect any other card made at about the same time will show similar issues. I don't think BGAs (ball grid arrays) have the same lifespan as QFPs, etc. Still, I think I'd try a used pull before I tried to reflow a BGA without the machine... --Glenn Lyford

There's millions of them on ebay.

Nice soldering. The macro picture makes it look easy. I zoomed out to actual size* & it was much more impressive. What kind/size of iron & solder? Any special technique?

Nice picture, too. Any special technique for it?

Keep up the good work, Bob

• - using the FireFox "Image Zoom" plug in.

Don, you sure have a steady hand. Did you use a microscope to see those 0.050" spaced pads?

If I tried that, I'd have two big solderballs.

Tell us your technique please.

Wes

I do way too much of this stuff myself. I often make prototypes by supergluing the part upside down to bare copper pcb laminate then soldering the wires. Little bits of double stick foam tape work well for positioning the wires.

Good luck on the BGA. I've never been able to successfully attach wires to one. Let us know if you get it to work.

I didn't know about those guys. Thanks!

Those aren't spaced .050. This is a mini-SO8 with pins spaced .026" on centers. Gaps between pins are about 0.015". I use a Meiji binocular zoom microscope set at about 5X magnification.

Reported in another post a few minutes ago. With the right tools, it's really not as tricky as it may seem. They are: a microscope and the Pace soldering station.

Ah! The tip is 1124-0003-P1 The guy that showed me how to work with surfacemount stuff uses the Pace Heatwise station. Same iron, no digital readout. His optical aid is a Mantis, really cool but not found on EBay in nearly the plenty that good binoc microscopes are, or were when I was looking anyway.

Like this: USB, 10 - 200x, 1.3Mpixel, $57?

one is 1/2 the resolution & twice the price (lots of example pix): How does one go about choosing one?

Thanks for awakening me to the existence of a new toy ... er, tool, Bob

Is this real? It always seemed like a phony gimmick to sell light bulbs. The incandescent color filtering can't have been high Q enough to affect insects, just a slight effect to impress the rubes. LEDs would be another matter.

The next word in my post after "bug-free yellow" that you excerpted was "LED". I'm using an amber 2.5-watt Luxeon LED. It really is ignored by bugs. I'm replacing one I made 2 years ago that disappeared last summer so I'm not hypothesizing here. It works, at the lake, in Minnesota.

In addition to being quite narrow spectrum, it also runs cool and emits about no IR.

Don Foreman wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Nice work! We have only a couple techs at work who are up to "dead- bugging" stuff that small with #30 wire. They do it fairly often when someone screws up a layout or needs to add a part to a design.

I made a "part holder" for soldering small surface mount parts a while back, and I've been thinking about turning it into a "product" for my retirement. I won't get rich, but it would be fun to make. The actual bit that holds the part down is currently a chunk of "orange stick". It tolerates soldering temps, can be sharpened to suit and is disposable.

The catch is that orange sticks aren't ESD approved. I've been trying to think of something that isn't too pricey that I could replace it with. It needs to stand up to soldering temps, be static dissipative, and thermally non-conducting. It should be moderately rigid, but soft enough that it can be whittled or pointed. Something in ~ 3/16" diameter rod would be perfect.

Does anyone know if I can buy carbon loaded teflon rod? Any other ideas for a material?

Thanks!

Doug White

snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Try a regular pencil. Nice graphite core, cheap, eraser end can be used on corroded contacts.

For those still trying to use wire solder on that small stuff, solder paste in a syringe is your friend.

Stan

If I were in the market for such a device, a feature that I would dearly love to have is isolation of the tabs for soldering. I.e., a barrier to keep me from getting solder where I don't want it.

Good luck, Bob

snipped-for-privacy@prolynx.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@f15g2000yqe.googlegroups.com:

Interesting idea. I'm not sure how conductive they are. I think it's mostly clay.

The solder paste at Digikey has a finite shelf life & is supposed to be refrigerated. For the amount of work I typcally do, I've always been afraid it will die before I can use even a 10th of it. Have you had any problems with it goign bad? I don't even know what the symptoms would be, probably poor flux behavior, or lots of oxides in the solder.

I have 15 mil diameter solder that works pretty well on tiny stuff.

Doug White