Desoldering Chips, was Re: Can someone,

[Tony Duell]

> 
> From: Joachim Thiemann
> 
> > Bummer.  I'm not good at desoldering chips without potential damage
> > to the board. Joe.
> 
> The easiest way to not damage the board is to cut the leads to the chip, 
> and then use a solder sucker to remove the solder in the hole along with 
> the remnants of the chip leads. Hopefully if one or more of the leads is 
> soldered to the ground plane, those pads used thermal isolation to 
> separate them from the ground plane.

A well-known trick (but worth repeatign nonetheless) is that once you 
have removed the IC body, you clamp/hold the board vertically, apply the 
soldering iron on the non-compoennt side of the board and the solder 
sucker to the same hole on the compoennt side. Normally that will get the 
holes totally clear.

I use that method to clean out holes if I want to add more components to 
a wave-soldred board (e.g. for doing a RAM upgrade).

-tony