cyclone3d wrote on 2021-03-17, 06:17:

Heh.. a good soldering iron does help. The plunger type al ways made me scared when I pressed the button that it was going to da […]
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Heh.. a good soldering iron does help. The plunger type al ways made me scared when I pressed the button that it was going to damage the pad on the motherboard from the sudden jerk it did.

They also take multiple plunges to remove solder from larger holes.

They are just a pain to use, especially when you are trying to hold the soldering iron in place and then quickly move it out of place and move the plunger into place and plung it before the solder solidifies.

Yeah... I hate the plunger type solder suckers.

usually only takes one pull for me on normal through holes, I also don't put it in place after the fact, I just place it non top of the hole slightly tilted so I can still get the soldering iron underneath and then just pull the soldering iron out and push the button, like I said, works surprisingly well, I've desoldered entire keyboards like that.

Yeah, normal holes are fine, the ones I have a problem with (only mentioning because I had fun with this recently) are those connected to power planes. When there's a slab of copper on both sides then after removing, e.g., a capacitor I often find a plug of solder remains and getting it to melt all the way through for the sucker to work can be a bother, sometimes involving hot air on one side and iron on the other.

Mouldotron, are you anywhere near Swindon? I'm in no way a pro, but should be able to manage removing one thing and fitting a socket (I'm assuming it's a standard 24pin 0.1" pitch, 0.6" wide DIL?) if you can't find anyone else. Though I don't have anything to test motherboards with.

Hi Snufkin

Thanks for the offer! I'm in North Wales so a bit of a trek from Swindon, but I've actually posted the two boards I have off to a chap in the midlands who does PCB repairs, mostly machinery control boards but he seems pretty well up on old PC gear and recons it's an easy job (which I'm sure it is if you're a PCB repair engineer).

I'll report back on the job in case others in the future want to go down this route.