Using soldering wick?

ian field

Joined Oct 27, 2012
6,536
I usually drip some liquid flux-like stuff on solder wick if I need to properly wipe clean a joint. But that might be due to the fact that I have crappy solder wick
IME; solder wick can work out expensive if you have a lot of solder to get rid of - usually I shift the bulk of it with a solder sucker, then see that I can finish the job like that and I save the wick for another day.

If you're trying to do a chip with SMD pins all the way round, you can get into difficulty with wick that isn't under the iron sticking to pins and ripping up tracks - the only cure for that is a "big bertha" iron, and I'd rather not!

Most times I deal with those all the way round chips; I need to remove the dead one from the board being repaired, and salvage the undamaged replacement from a scrap board. If the chip coming out is dead anyway, just shear the pins off at the header with a craft knife. If the donor board is scrap anyway, heat the other side with a modellers pencil blowtorch (some people use a hotplate) it really is the quickest way to uniformly heat all the solder joints at once.

Practice on a few scrap boards, with practice it becomes easy to unsolder ICs quickly so they don't toast.
 
Top