Why not spend an hour or so with a high power magnifier and look for
obviously poor soldered components before embarking on this potentially
distructive approach?

DaveC wrote:

On Sun, 29 May 2005 19:44:19 -0700, Jim Adney wrote
(in article ):



I've done things like this a few times, and the technique that I found
that seemed to work best was to position the board just above (1-2") a
hot plate, and set the hot plate to just below the solder melting
point. Then I could go into the board with a heat gun or soldering
iron, depending on the task, and apply the small amount of additional
local heat that the job required.



Thanks, Jim. This sounds like a good approach.

It brings up a couple of questions: how can I be sure that I don't exceed the
pre-heating temperature (with the hot plate)? I don't want components
dropping off of the underside of the board. And once I start to heat the
topside of the board with the gun, how can I be sure I don't exceed the
melting point of the solder? I understand that getting things too hot will
melt the solder connections within an IC (they use a higher melting point
solder to avoid this problem during manufacture of the PCB, or so I hear.)

Thanks,



--
Joe Leikhim K4SAT
"The RFI-EMI-GUY"

The Lost Deep Thoughts By: Jack Handey
Before a mad scientist goes mad, there's probably a time
when he's only partially mad. And this is the time when he's
going to throw his best parties.