I have had more success with a solder sucker then wick when it comes to my poker pcb.
I was very new to soldering also and thoughy i had dmged my board also, they are pretty resilient as long as you don't lift a pad. Even then can be fixed.
Gl!
Hmmm and how would one, fix said problem... No reason of course...
I wouldn't waste too much time trying to get all the solder out of a double sided through hole with a braid. Even with a good quality solder sucker, such as the Edsyn Soldapullt, you may not get all the solder out. With a desoldering tool such as a Hakko 808, maybe.
Insert the leads of the LED into their location in the switch, as far as they will go. Then alternate heating both pads with your soldering iron, while pushing the LED into the holes. When the LED is properly seated, trim the leads and give it a good bead of solder as with any joint.
Also, try not to leave the iron tip on the solder pads too long. It doesn't look like you have a temperature controlled iron, so it's probably way too hot for what you're doing. You could end up burning the solder pads off the holes.
Hope this helps!
So I thought of this right after I finished and was curious why this wasn't the standard glad to know I wasn't completely crazy for thinking I could do something like that!
So I watched a few youtube videos and decided to go for it, I have a new keyboard on the way so worst case scenerio I destroy the thing and have one less board to not use for no reason.
And I'm quite happy with the result, I sadly removed a soldering pad but I ended up just making a pattern of missing leds so it wasn't obvious there was just one missing and honestly you cant even tell (as long as I continue to use thick PBT non led trans (or whatever the keys that have a window for the backlight are called)
It's in a Blue Tex Aluminum case, I also have an Acrylic one on the way from Massdrop and was going to try to buy some led strips to put in the case to make it glow from within but wasn't sure how I would achieve that.
Also as someone who used to be a goldsmith I'm quite used to welding Jewelery and repairing gold/silver/platinum but haven't worked with any of the metals used for this, I didn't think about this until just as I was typing this, should I be concerned if I inhaled a decent amount of fumes?