Brass has quite poor heat conductivity, less than a third that of
copper, not sure if that would still work.
I don't know how well it holds up, since I have never seen a soldering
tip made of brass, if it gets eaten like copper or no.
If you want decent life you want to have iron plating.
Some manufacturers (Plato, Ersa) even used to put little iron ferrules
into their desoldering tips.
I have cheap chinese desoldering stations at home and at work (Zhongdi
ZD-915), but heavily modified.
With the one at work there is very little left of the original station.
They work so good now I was so far unable to find a better commercial
station, even the $1000 ones are not as good as the cheap $100 chinese
one, although they probably have well over $1000 in modification time
in them.
As soon as anyone demonstrates a better desoldering station he can
have the $1000 I've put on the budget for it, but I won't give the
money away for something that doesn't work as well as what I have come
up with myself.
I'd like to try the new ersa x-tool vario, it seems well thought out,
but it was unavailable last time I tried to get one.
ST
On Fri, Jul 27, 2018 at 5:18 PM, Michael A. Terrell
<mike.terrell@...> wrote:
I only lifted a couple pads, out of thousands. The ones that did lift were on very low grade consumer products. I agree that there are better methods available today, but what else was available to most of us, in the pre-internet days?
I have about a dozen new spare tips, and a 7x14 metal lathe. Some hard brass rod and a little time machining it will give me more of them if I ever need them. I'm in my late 60s, and no longer spend full days reworking PC boards.
I worked at a defense plant back in the '70s, after my time in the Army. The women doing the rework had no desoldering irons, only wet wicking. They were all put through the NASA approved soldering course, yet I could do things they couldn't. Their boss 'borrowed' me to teach them some new things, in spite of their union steward's instance that no man could solder. I spent the rest of my time there doing QA and Module interchangeability on the PRC77 manpack radios.
Michael A. Terrell
-----Original Message-----
From: Ray Burke <burke.ray@...>
Sent: Jul 27, 2018 10:10 AM
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Wow Radio Shack desoldering Iron Best review ever, Re: [TekScopes] 466-464 stray wire
The Radio Shack Desoldering bulb is useless because you cant get the tips any more, no more Radio Shack. I have used the Radio Shack Desoldering bulb, (have one). Solder Wick, Solder Suckers and other tools, while they are cheap, they do cause damage to the circuit boards with pulled pads, through holes, and other problems, ( I have used them and damaged my boards). Don't use any of the cheap alternatives, if you want to save the circuit boards. Use at least a good Desoldering gun or station. Use at least a Hakko FR-301 which I just bought, or a better Hakko Desoldering station, there are others that are more expensive like Pace, Metcal, which I used at work. I just used it to repair my wife's monitor that died with no power, and opened it up and found about three bulging capacitors, replaced all eight on the power supply, and fixed it. After getting the caps at Fry's it only took me about 20 minutes to change all eight, love my new Desoldering gun, NO PULLED PADS. One other thing is manufacture support, Hakko is the best. I got a desoldering station from my work, which they didn't want any more and Hakko had the tips for the thing. Now you could get some cheap Chinese knockoff but support may not be their in a few years, or at all. Buy at least a Hakko and you won't be disappointed. The other main desoldering companies are more expensive. You could check out the tear apart videos of the www.EEVBlog with Dave Jones.
On Thursday, July 26, 2018 11:36 PM, Michael A. Terrell <mike.terrell@...> wrote:
I started working in a TV shop at 13, in 1965. One older tech was a fountain of practical knowledge. I wasn't old enough to open an account at the local parts house, so he would buy things for me so Ii didn't have to go through our boss and pay his markup. He bought me my first desoldering iron which was a professional version of that Radio Shack version. It was made by Endevco, and it was almost $40 which was a lot for a kid making a buck an hour after school. He was also the one who got me started on Ersin Multicore solder. I've never regretted paying a little extra for good solder, because there was very little waste.
We handed the resale of a wave solder machine for Lockheed Martin around 1990, along with other process equipment after they shut down a production line in one of the Orlando plants.
Microdyne was still using the same grade of paste solder they tarted with, even though the SMD parts were a lot smaller than the first they used. I had to fight with Manufacturing engineering to buy a type with smaller solder balls and a RMA flux. The fine pitch ICs (IE: MC68340) came out of the early ovens with unmelted solder balls under the ICs, and the 0402 passives were tombstoning. They had spent a wad on that Heller oven, but the quality hadn't changed. Once we had better solder, we could refine the reflow profiles. That eliminated over 95% of the reflow problems within a few months, as they continued to refine the profiles.
Did you build much equipment for your Amateur radio hobby? I went a different route, into broadcasting. Not many hams ever got to pump out 5MW EIRP of RF from a 1700 foot tower. :)
Michael A. Terrell
