Soldering

[Dave Plowman (News)]

What do you commonly build, as a matter of interest?

[whisky-dave]

The ones we have are called rework stations by JBC they were about £12

00 and £700 depending on accessories which can included heated tweezer s and special guides for heated hot air.

and who is doing the work, I wouldn't let any of our undergrads loose on a £1200 re-work station, they get a solder sucker or desoldering wick. When they ask for tweezers I give the £6 set rather than the set that cost £180.

[Bill]

In message , whisky-dave writes

Well, I'm at about the level of your undergrads, then. I'm very familiar with simple plunger solder sucker and wick for desoldering, and my tweezers cost less than ?6.

SWMBO borrowed my side cutters to unsuccessfully shorten the stalks on some artificial flowers, so they now have serrated cutting edges.

I've ended up ordering the cheapest 2-in-1 soldering station from Amazon to use up a gift card I was given for last Christmas.

It can't be to much of a leap from ECC83 bases. SMD ahoy.

[Bob Eager]

The last bases I soldered were for 807s.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

The desolder station I have has a conventional iron - except the bit has a hole down the middle and is connected to a vacuum pump, via filters. Pump controlled by a switch on the iron body.

Not a delicate device, but not a cheap one either.

The sort of thing you don't know how you managed without after you've tried one.

[Theo]

I've not used one of those, but I think it would be of limited use for SMD soldering. Typically you don't have enough solder to form a blob that you can suck - you often have a small amount on the pad that you want to clean up. (The right gauge of) fluxed solder wick is good at doing that without disturbing anything else.

Spring-loaded solder suckers are fairly useless for SMD for the same reason.

A small vacuum pick with a rubber cup on the end is, however, handy in SMD work for picking up components once they've been desoldered by hot air, and sometimes for placing them.

Theo

[Bill]

In message , Bob Eager writes

Ah, yes, 807's.

I never encountered them in audio amplifiers, but was involved with a pair of Ampex 350 (?) tape machines that each had Ampex-built power amps to provide varispeed by driving the capstan motors.

Superb, bullet-proof machines, but we eventually had to build one power amp from the two and had the capstans plated and re-sintered to change the basic machines from 60c/s to 50c/s. A small local sub-contractor to Rolls-Royce did this.

The varispeed let you sync the slap-back echo to the tempo of the music as per Sun records.

Those were the days.

Sorry. Now back to your usual programming.......

[tony sayer]

In article , Bill scribeth thus

Err, yes, round these parts many years ago had four of them nailed to a breadboard! well it was a largish breadboard and the nails were small nails the 807's were soldered to the nails and in all it produced enough welly for ye olde pirate wireless station, Fen radio 207 Metres, to reach most of East Anglywold, them's were the days;)..

[Bob Eager]

Did the same, but I used sockets fitted to an inverted biscuit tin.