then I use an air hose to blast off the solder. This works really

good. Just be sure to do it outside where there is no chance of

fire.

A tgimboej is probably not a great place for SMT components, but they are light, and the idea of the box is to give others a chance to get components they would not otherwise get. I would stick them in, with a label on the packet saying “un-tested”.
My rules for sticking something into a http://www.tgimboej.org box:
1. I would love to build this into something, but I’m honestly never going to get around to using it.
2. I dunno what it is, but it probably works.
3. I have lots of these, and cannot possibly use them all.

I will have to try get a heat gun

So my tips based on the 20 boards I’ve stripped so far.

1. Heat up the face side of SMD components and scrape them off before working the other parts…they pop, and shoot off, sometimes inside the gun

2. Plastic parts, focus the heat on the underside, and remove plastic parts first, BEFORE the board gets too hot. – I used this to obtain some more optical encoders, lots of switches, and connectors.

3. If there is a particular IC that you are interested KEEP the board handy, or better still take a picture of the wiring BEFORE you break it down. That way, if you can’t fid a datasheet on the small LCD screen it drives, you can perhaps figure out what is going on using the original (HT1621D driving an unknown LCD in my case).

I now have a question. What do I do with this bag full of SMD IC’s that I have no use of? Conrad Braam, is it worth sticking these into TIMBOEJ box?

Anyone wanting to contact me, and send a box of junk my way, just google my name, yes, that’s me.

As far as solder on boards, I can only imagine a solder bath holds one kind of solder only, if it did not, there would be board failures one suspects. If some parts are harder to remove, it’s the hole size that is intentionally differing, or whether the hole is in fact thru-plated or not.

Anyway, the heat gun thing I shall be trying this evening. Thanks for sharing. I wanted to chip in and mention something when desoldering with an iron. I noticed on some of the HP boards, that holed components had a square and a circle on a resistor. One would heat up fairly quickly, the other would take a LONG time. Are manufacturers mixing solder types to make it harder to salvage/recycle the boards?

Good ventilation is a must. We work on these in a wood shop, with the big vents running. We also have a fan blowing at the board from behind the person, so the fumes are pushed away to begin with.

I don’t have any trouble heating larger solder blobs with my heat gun. One thing I do notice, though, is that the heat delivery pattern of my heat gun is not as obvious as I’d think, and it often helps to wave the gun around a little (even just 1/2″ side to side).

I can often get TO-220s with the heat gun, and often can’t. My assessment is that it has to do with the size of the through-holes more than the amount of solder — with bigger holes, the solder melts and the parts fall right out. Toward the bottom of a much older post, I relate my tremendous success using an iron with a .3″ chisel tip to get TO-220s. Didn’t need the heat gun at all.

It takes longer than I thought it would, and it seems like bigger blobs of solder are resistant to head-gun heat, even when other pins are completely molten. Components with larger pins (e.g. TO-220) refuse to come out this way. I can pull forever – eventually I can see the board around the pins getting soft, but the solder isn’t molten because the leads are just wicking away too much heat.

In one case, I was removing a 5-pin component that stubbornly refused to let go of one pin (with more solder than the others). I had my soldering iron on, and without removing the heat gun, I picked up the iron with my free hand and touched the pin. The part immediately came loose.

This led me to wonder about a hybrid approach: using the heat gun to sustain heat, and using the soldering iron on each pin. I’m going to give this a try and see if it’s significantly better.

I’ve salvaged a few boards where the drill holes were so small, the pins physically fit through very tightly regardless of solder. Maybe that’s what happened here?

Any chance you could email me some close-up pics of one or two of those boards, maybe before and after? Don’t know whether I can really do remote diagnosis, but it might ring a bell with something I’ve encountered before.