[sdiy] Desolder Station?

[GothGeek Sysadmin]

On Sat, Sep 29, 2001 at 12:38:36PM -0700, patchell wrote:
>     Last place I worked, we must have purchased every desolder station you can imagine, and many of these were quite expensive, but they were all basically the same.  They all used a vacuum pump.  All of them could be classified as being undependable.
> Even the people who used the thing the most could never keep them working well.  I would imagine if you treated the thing like a fire arm and cleaned it every time you were done with it, it might work for a long time...but, they were generally only
> 

A quick fix for this is an aircompressor.
I prefer the Ungar desoldering stations.  Use it until you get tired of
cleaning them ( about 10 minutes ) then gut it.  You need :
1. Ungar Desoldering station
2. electropneumatic valve ( try Herbeck and Rademon which I'm positive I'm
spelling wrong ).
3. cheap tank aircompressor *with exposed plumbing.
4. Some tubing. I use copper cause its easy to work with.
5. a vacuum gauge and if you can find one a vacuum switch. ( also H&R for me )

The plan should be obvious now but...
Remove the internal pump from the desoldering station.  Replace it with
the pneumatic valve.  I've been lucky sofar and found valves that were
appropriate voltage/current. YMMV.
Run some copper tubing to the aircompressor.  On the compressor swap the
inlet and outlet from the compressor housing and hook up the copper pipe.
Crank up the compressor, get the tank to a decent negative pressure and
start desoldering everything in sight.

Drawbacks: after you've pumped about 20lbs of solder thru it you'll
probably want to remove the inlet-side pipe from the valve and
just open it up for a minute to clean out the piping.  And eventually
the tank will start becoming a bit full of solder.  I havent found a good
way to clean the tanks out but they are pretty cheap as replacement
parts ( cheaper then a few filters for a desoldering station ). No, I
dont bother even using the filters in the station, never found a need.
At least its easy to get all that solder to a recycling center, they can
deal with extracting it.

Overkill? Perhaps. But if you buy a few pallets of surplus avionics and
want to extract the ICs with as little damage as possible ( you do *not*
want to ask what happened to the ua726s... really... please... dont ask )
I havent found a better way.  Besides, people really look at your workbench
strange with that kind of equipment hooked up.

Now that I'm in the SF Bay Area and finally hitting surplus places again I
may need to build another, this time around I plan to try out thick wall
teflon tubing.  super high pressure doesnt seem to be a need, just 
not running the compressor until all the bits have settled in the tank.
Probably a particulate filter would work pretty good too since the solder
is totally cooled by the time it travels all the tubing.

( this isnt exactly synth-DIY but it does make some neat whistling noises
when it springs a leak... )

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