haha, it isn't that bad, although I think she tries to repress it..
We have a tile floor with carpet dampener, a slab of concrete, more dampener, and another slab with the machine bolted down. This keeps it very sturdy and keeps the people below from a very irritating vibration. We also have a plexi-shield around 1/2 the machine which keeps the coolant soaked metal chips from getting everywhere.
There's a great site for people interested in cnc mills, www.cnczone.comwww.taigtools.com The taig people give a really good discount to students, i think it was around 30%.
I used to work on equipment that did BGA repairs at work. They used a combination of hot nitrogen (really hot, it melted the solder) and a prism arangement that let you line up the chip to the pads before bringing the chip down mechanically. This shop (Alcatel) also had an x-ray machine to examine the solder job for voids, more of a failure analysis I suspect, that wasn't part of my job. I calibrated the machine, checked temps, and alignment of the optics.
Never even occured to me it could be done manually. I'm sorry it didn't work out, but the equipment does exist. Like all things specialized, expensive.
Well that was a crappy experience! My student special from advanced circuits came preloaded with a catastrophic failure! I troubleshooted for a day trying to figure out why one of my bridges didn't switch or react at all, you will see the answer in the pic below. hint:that copper between those two planes isn't supposed to be there.. That's the output of the bridge and next to it is ground. This wasn't found until I had resoldered 3 bridges and destroyed them all... Then, after fixing the mistake and soldering a new bridge, I had to replace my chargepump diodes. What a nightmare
The board seems to work great right now, so I am happy.. It's a bit uglier from lots of rework and having to reattach a fried trace (under the package). I'm complaining tomorrow.. I pretty much wasted an entire day diagnosing all that could go wrong and about 35$ in parts..