Hey all,

Have plenty of experience soldering but I am thinking I will need to replace a couple of flash chips (located on a printed circuit board) of my ECU.

I have seen numerous threads on the car forums regarding ways to do this, most reference DIY hot air guns and even more reference problems with lifting/damaging the pads of the PC boards and melting adjacent components :S... Being reasonably good at soldering I think that hot air seems criminal (although I know there are awesome quality reflow benches that slow heat/slow cool the work piece)


I have seen on youtube people use chip quik which is a low melt temp solder (around 150c) and claims that it doesn't get hot enough to lift pads - it looks great on youtube lol, you just flux the chip flow the low temp solder on top of the regular solder, it stays molten enough & combines with regular solder to slide the whole chip off the board by lowering melting temp of normal solder (or so it says) has anyone got any experience with this, how good does it work anyone got any 1st hand experience?

Obviously inverse to getting the board and too hot if you don't get it hot enough or use force to remove the board you damage the pads as well right as they just pull right off with the legs?

Can you fix damaged copper trace pads?

What's the best way for resoldering the chips, I've seen people on youtube just flux the chip, tin the iron and then jus touch it to a pin at each corner to tack it down (which seems logical to me), then they just use a drag solder technique (lying the solder over the pins and running the iron across them) does this work well ?

 

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