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PSA: I finally stopped swapping laptop boards by hand and started using a hot air station at 380C
For a solid 4 years I did every board-level repair in my garage in Toledo with a cheap iron and a heat gun from Harbor Freight. I would sit there for 20 minutes trying to wick solder off a charging port while the plastic around it warped, and half the time I lifted a pad and had to run a jumper wire. Then a guy named Dev at a repair meetup in Cleveland watched me struggle with a MacBook backlight and just said "you're cooking it evenly with that gun, you're just not controlling where the heat goes." So I bought a $140 hot air station with adjustable temp and airflow, set it to 380C with the smallest nozzle I had, and the very first job, a dead HDMI port on a PS5, came off in about 40 seconds with zero damage. The trick was preheating from the bottom with a cheap mug warmer I picked up at Goodwill for $6, which keeps the board from sucking all the heat away. I still use the iron for through-hole stuff and wire work, but for anything with a ground plane, hot air plus flux is the move and I'm not going back. My success rate on consoles went from maybe 60 percent to something like 95 percent, mostly because I stopped rushing and learned to wait for the solder to actually go shiny. Any of you still on the old iron-only method, or did something specific finally make you switch?
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logan23617d ago
Waiting for solder to go shiny sounds good, but 380C is way too hot for most laptop boards.
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