As for soldering irons...
I started out with a 30W Radio Shack "gun-style" iron about 20 years ago... and still have it and use it. However, it is NOT for motherboard recapping or anything that requires too much thermal mass, as this iron does not have much in the way of that.
Next, got a 40 Watt Radio Shack (again) desoldering iron with a rubber bulb (was popular back then) and... didn't use it a whole lot. As mentioned by a few other members here, it does kind of suck, and not in a good way. However, it does have its uses - I used it mainly for scavenging multipin DIP ICs from *single layer* PCBs (mostly old CRT TV/monitor boards, PSU board, and etc.) as well as replace a few flyback transformers on CRTs. It's clearly an outdated tool and its function would easily be replaced by one of the desoldering irons mentioned by other members above. So only mentioning it here for historical purposes.
After many years with struggling with the above two (along with getting a heat gun to help me do my 1st mobo recap with the 30 Watt Radio Shack iron above), eventually I got gifted a T12 tip style iron - a Circuit Specialists CSI 2900 (a rebranded Aoyue 2900) 75 Watt temperature-controlled soldering station... and that was really "it" for me. Didn't find the need to upgrade to anything else after, at least for the work I do, which is primarily PSU and motherboard recapping.
That being said, how do I remove caps from a motherboard without a desoldering iron? Really simple:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showpost.php?p= … 87&postcount=23
After this, I use a stainless steel needle to clear the holes.
Might sound like more work, but I'd rather do that any day over fiddling with a desoldering station. FWIW, the repair shop I worked at over 12 years ago did get a Hakko vacuum desoldering station (I forget what model number now, but kinda similar to the praised FR- units mentioned above.) I tried it, but just didn't like it. At the time, we were doing mostly console "repairs" (a.k.a. reflow "magic" on the Xbox 360's and PS3 GPUs), but occasionally also had to change caps on some Xbox 360 motherboards (be it because someone "baked" the board or because a few of the 1st gen 360 mobos came with Sanyo WF caps, which went bad pretty quickly.) Since I was de-facto "the recap guy" in that place, my experience with the Hakko desoldering station was that it was just too much maintenance to deal with way too frequently... despite being careful with it and not trying to pull anything more than solder from cap holes. But more importantly, that Hakko desoldering station kind of struggled with the big copper planes on the Xbox 360 motherboards, no matter if or how much flux + leaded solder was added to the cap solder spots . So certain holes would take multiple tries to get them cleared and the caps desoldered. Thus, it got to the point where it was just easier and faster to go back to my "cap walk-out method" with the 75-Watt CSI 2900 station... and why I continue to do recaps this way. Not to mention it's just one tool for the entire job.
That said, the CSI 2900 soldering station that I use has been out of production for a while now, so I can't really recommend it.
However what I *can* recommend are stations that use cartridge T12 -type soldering tips - basically stations that have the heating element built into each tip.
This is VASTLY different from the likes of the cheap 900M "cartridge" type tips, where the tip goes on top of a ceramic heating element. In the case of the 900M tips in particular, they lack thermal mass IME. And more importantly, depending on how cheap you go with them, the really low-quality tips and/or stations that use 900M tips will have poor thermal coupling to the tip "cartridges", resulting in really really poor heat transfer. FWIW, I also have a KADA 852D+ hot air + soldering iron station AIO unit. I didn't mention it in my history above, because it wasn't really worth mentioning. The hot air part is O.K. The soldering iron uses really cheap 900M tips and it's almost good for nothing. The fact that my 30 Watt Radio Shack iron performs better should tell something. I also used a few other Hakko clones with 900M tips back in that repair shop, and while they were better than the iron on my 852D+, they were still not something I'd deem adequate for recapping a motherboard.
So TLDR:
- Soldering stations / irons that use cartridge T12 -type tips - YES PLEASE!
- Soldering stations / irons that use 900M type (or similar "slip-on" style) tips - not recommended.
Now, if you have deep(er) pockets, you can go with a station brand like JBC. I had the pleasure of using one back in that repair shop many years ago, and it was a FINE soldering station, to say the least. We used it mostly to clean BGA pads under the GPUs of the Xbox 360s after removing the GPUs. With a 30 mm -wide tip, it had ZERO problems heating the board up - with and without braid. So yeah, that station was totally worth its money (from what I understood at the time, around $500). Obviously hard to justify that kind of money for the occasional hobby work, but just had to mention for purposes of showing a bigger "specter" of what's available out there in terms of soldering stations.
Oh, and a honorable mention I skipped talking about above...
I also have a very old Soviet-made 40 Watt regular soldering iron - a pass-me-down from my dad. Like most old things from that era, it was made of quality materials... but most importantly, it has a BIG, FAT, COPPER tip. So despite the rather low 40 Watt power rating, it has excellent thermal transfer and thus CAN be used for motherboard recaps - without much difficulty, either. The only reason why I still prefer my CSI 2900 is not because of power issues, but because the T12 tip holder on the CSI 2900 is much shorter than the big, long "wand" on that old 40 Watt iron. In essence, it's just easier to control tip motion when the tip is shorter (insert "that's what she said joke here"? 🤣 )
So it goes to show that in the end, tip design is the most important thing when it comes to soldering irons... with tip thermal mass thermal mass probably in the #1 spot. Everything else comes after that.
Speaking of tips, I prefer/use mostly the clunky "fat" types - e.g. either chisel or bevel type (but mostly bevel). The most used tips on my CSI 2900 are the D52 (5.2 mm wide bevel type) and BC3 (~3 mm "flattened pencil" type).
