bodger

I decided to buy SparkFun's $10 Heaterizer XL 3000 Heat Gun to try for heat stink and desoldering duties. I'm getting more and more opportunities to remove surface mount parts from boards, and this looks like a more cost-effective approach than a surface mount rework station with a bunch of nozzles for different size and shape parts. Hey, it's only $10 and the instruction manual is a hoot! Seriously, give it a read.

Today, I decided to give its desoldering abilities a whirl. I grabbed a scrap board (from an HP multi-function printer, if you're curious) and had at.

Board with removed chips

It did a nice job neatly removing even high pin count chips. All I did was blast the chip with hot air for a minute or two, then rap the board on a hard surface, and the chips fell right off. Even BGA packages, chips with thermal pads soldered down, connectors, and power transistors with heatsink tabs. It made short work of all of 'em.

Small SMD parts

I also got a rain of smaller parts I wouldn't normally bother to salvage, right down to teeny little packages I'd have to pick up with tweezers (Picture taken with an ancient 55mm Micro-Nikkor lense I picked up on eBay for $15).

I am quite satisfied with this little beast. It does a lovely job at melting whatever I point it at.