Finished assembling my first full keyboard ever. GON NerD TKL - 121 resistors, 34 surface mount LEDs, and a lot more trough hole soldering (which I have never been more appreciative of after finishing all the SMD soldering). Encountered a few issues that I improvised with along the way because I was impatient about finishing this keyboard, but I figured now that I finished, I would ask for future reference (Duck Viper come to me please
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1) What setup do you guys solder with (chairs/table height included)? I am rather focus minded, so once I start, I like to finish - soldered for 5 hours straight, with my back aching afterwards because I was always kind of hunched over trying to get the tweezers to poke the SMD into the little pool of solder correctly. I have a Panavise, but didn't use it because I was afraid that I would break the PCB if I applied too much pressure on it (have to rest my wrists on the table/PCB or else my hands shake way too much to do anything).
2) What is the best way to desolder a switch? I had to desolder a few times due to really dumb mistakes, and each time I found that I often had just a
tiny bit of solder left over in the joint that would cause the switch to stick. Fortunately, it was often just one of the pins, so I could just heat it up and pull out the switch on the other side after the solder melted. It was a pain in the ass though, and made me wonder how people desolder entire boards - I was tired enough just desoldering 15 switches (and an LED in a switch, that was even harder). I used a soldapullt
3) Will 99% isopropyl alcohol damage the PCB? I didn't have 99% on hand, but on my techkeys business card (which is kind of like my test PCB), I tried i think about 70%? alcohol, which caused the PCB to become faded and dull instead of retaining its previous shininess.