Originally posted by: CZroe
Originally posted by: Kosmic StarDust
Lookin' good; glad you guys fixed it. And I can't believe he did fine pitch solder work with a chisel tip. Blows my mind. Get a needle tip from the Shack or something...
Surprisingly, I see a lot of professionals specifically saying not to use a needle tip and recommending a chisel tip. Pretty sure I've heard this from the likes of GameTech US, EEVBlog, etc. I use a needle tip but I frequently see exactly what they are talking about when I sometimes simply cannot get it to transfer heat from a certain angle/position where a chisel tip would have worked fine.
See? I don't do fine pitch hand solder work and limit my mods to through hole stuff, which is fine for anything prior to 16-bit era.
I wouldn't have thought a blunt tip like a chisel would be better suited than a needle tip, because small work = small tip. And while the heat transfer is slower with the smaller surface area, the parts are also smaller and heat up faster.
Just goes to show I don't know everything. When studying Electrical Engineering Technology, they never taught us how to do fine pitch work in school. We took a very basic fab class as a freshman electronics course where we learned to use a soldering iron, and nearly everything we touched afterwards was done on breadboards.
In fact most industry in manufacturing is done with reflow ovens, pick and place robots, and RoHS complaint lead-free solder. Through hole work is reserved only for connectors and parts which require robustness, since human labor is required for through hole parts whom are an order of magnitude slower than robots.
I even toured a local facility with their own fab plant. Hardly anyone does fine pitch handwork in a modern manufacturing environment, where it is generally cheaper to scrap and replace the PCB or even whole device than to make hand repairs on it.
So hobbiest modding and electronics repair requires a very different skillset compared to traditional manufacturing. Though I must admit, my education came in handy when it comes to designing my own circuits without a schematic to follow. I don't need a schematic to know how to add turbo function to an arcade controller for instance.