How to Remove Solder

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Ken D. Orlich on behalf of Expert Village. Okay, this is removing a component. What we're going to remove is this big can here, it's a capacitor. The leads are right on the back here. So I'm going to put this in the vice. Something that's a little difficult about soldering, typically, is the fact that you need three hands to do it. Obviously, no one has three hands, so you need something to hold your work. You need three hands usually because you've got your hand full of soldering iron and usually either a solder removal tool or a solder. So that's why you need something to hold your work securely. Going to lower that down here. Get another look here, where's my component, right there. And I'm using a little bit different gas powered one here; this one is a self-igniting one. Let's try it out here. So I'm going to let that heat up. If you can see in there it's got a little bit of flame. See the orange in there. Let's see, alright, you know it's hot when you touch your sponge, see a little bit of steam coming up there. Another thing on that too is you don't want to really just keep it in the sponge, because when you do that then you're cooling it. It kind of defeats the purpose of soldering, because you need the heat. So once again take a look at my board, so we're going to remove the component here. You push this down. This is a solder removal tool. Hold it on there. Just hold that until it liquefies, you'll watch it just kind of liquefy see that? Kind of put that on there. Sucks it right up, spits it right out. I'm going to do a solder stand there. I'm going to do a little adjustment here, kind of push it down. There we go. It's almost removed. Do it a little bit more. Just to be sure. Another thing too, is you don't want to keep the heat on the trace; it's called, where the components go through a little hole. You don't want to leave it on there too long because the trace can actually lift up if there's heat on it for too long. So it's kind of a fine line here as you do stuff."