How to desolder a Tipro and rescue stuck solder wick

[berserkfan]

Does anyone have any tips for desoldering a Tipro? I have not done a double sided board before and have much difficulty. I have done many single sided boards so I have some experience. I have a goot soldapull; helped me extract most of the solder from the tops but the deeper parts of this double sided PCB is still filled with solder and now I can't reach the solder that needs to be extracted.

Now my soldering wick (I cut several pieces) is stuck at several places on the board and can't come out. The wick seems to have minimal effect. When doing Cherry boards the wick was easy to use and I could always see the telltale plume of gas whenever the melting point was reached and the solder sucked up. On this board the wick doesn't produce much gas (same spool of wick) and it sucks up very little.

Any advice is welcome and will be immediately tried out!

[jdcarpe]

To get the wick off, you'll probably have to add lots of flux and then heat it until it comes off.

To get the solder out of the plated through holes, I would HIGHLY recommend a suction device, such as a Soldapullt. I would never attempt to desolder a double sided PCB with only solder wick.

[berserkfan]

To get the wick off, you'll probably have to add lots of flux and then heat it until it comes off.

To get the solder out of the plated through holes, I would HIGHLY recommend a suction device, such as a Soldapullt. I would never attempt to desolder a double sided PCB with only solder wick.

I have a goot soldapull and it has helped me extract plenty of solder. But the holes are still mostly filled i.e. the pins don't show up clean. And soldapull can't extract anymore. That's when I bring in the wick.

[dorkvader]

I used to run into this a lot. What I ended up doing was:
1. cue up 4 seasons of star trek
2. add lots of lead solder
3. suck all lead solder and some lead-free solder out of the hole
4. repeat 2-3 until enough solder is out of one of the holes.
5. melt solder on other pad and remove switch.
6. use sucker to remove solder from other pad
7. repeat 2-6 for all switches.

It ended up taking 1-20 minutes per switch, give or take. The board and switches turned out okay in the end, but I had to let the PCB cool down every few switches or so. Ground planes can store a lot of heat.

[xavierblak]

dorkvader already mentioned it. But to be clear sometimes to remove stubborn solder you need to add solder.

It helps it flow better and sometimes it easier to suck a glob of solder rather than get the last bit filling a hole. That goes the same for the solder wick. If it's stuck to the board just add some solder to loosen it up.

[jacobolus]

You should be able to suck all the solder out of a hole in one go with a Soldapullt. If that doesn’t work, you need to add more solder back into the hole and try again. You need to make sure that you heat up the solder enough that the entire mass of solder is one molten blob, so that it will all pull up at once. If some of it doesn’t get heated up enough, then it will tend to stick. Leaded solder is a lot easier here than lead-free. Even a mix of lead-free and leaded solder is usually a lot easier to suck up than just a bit of the lead-free stuff.

[dorkvader]

You need to make sure that you heat up the solder enough that the entire mass of solder is one molten blob, so that it will all pull up at once.

I had a problem with this where I would only re-melt the lead solder I had added, and was left in the same position as before. Pace recommends you heat everything up, and stir the lead around in a circle to make sure all the solder is melted. This may not be possible with a cherry switch, but their reason for saying this is the same as mine: to ensure all the solder is melted before applying vacuum.