Thursday, November 1, 2007

Surface mount hot-air soldering Iron

Here's my hot air SMD Soldering Iron.

Based on this one.

I used a different desoldering iron design than the radioshack one, added a real cheap aquarium airpump. And I mean REAL cheap.


And the end product is this:


The original tip's opening was too large and trying to pinch it resulted it in breaking so I went looking for a replacement and found that the tip of a metal refill pencil works great.


One advice for this type of iron.. You don't want to unscrew those two screws when changing the tip. If you do and start turning the tip you WILL ruin your iron. Since I'm used to oldschool soldering iron I did it without thinking. I ended up having to order another one.


The mod is really quite simple, It's basically what's visible in the picture plus adding some desoldering braid into the pipe and tip to achieve better temps. After a 20 minute preheat it melts semi-large lumps of solder in 2-3 seconds.