Welcome to the forums
den_el_vegano wrote:I must say that i find it very curious to have a person that is professionally repairing the flexing problem coming up here and say "be careful with what you do, because you can harm to your material - best you give me (or one of the pros) much more money and we do it good for you". This is not sharing skills - that's just scaring people and keeping one's skills.
I run a reflowing company in UK with many customers in Europe. More details about myself can be found via the
blue banner advert at the top of the page.
You make some good points about "professionals" appearing to put off "amateurs" from having a go themselves.
I would never dissuade anyone from having a go - see my posts throughout this thread - but what you won't have seen are the numbers of boards sent to us by people who have already tried it and failed - boards that have been burnt black and are completely useless.
I've said this before but will repeat it again, the sort of heat gun you're wanting to use produces massive amounts of heat which can ruin boards in an instant, even with the sort of remote temperature sensor you're also wanting to use.
I do also need to say that those sensors are in fact quite inaccurate - we have them on our Reflowing Stations but use thermocouple probes which are much more accurate.
So we don't want to put you off but for you to be aware of the real dangers of permanent damage to your board - it this scaring people I wonder?
den_el_vegano wrote:I would prefer RealBlackStuff telling us how he does it in order to fix the problem (with a little bit of more chances of success). But he won't because he's making money out of it, and so i don't see what he is doing on this thread, if he's not sharing any experience with us! I hate this "professionalism" that wants us to believe that only a professional can do a good job! This is a forum and should not just be a place for advertising!
I'll answer this on behalf of RealBlackStuff (RBS) since we are working together on a new venture to supply refurbished boards to US forum members (see
here), and I'm doing the repairing side of it.
The process we use is called is called Infrared Reflowing using very expensive equipment from
Ersa. It's quite a complex process but using it we can both resolder the chips and also reball them if necessary - that is we remove the chip completely, replace the old solder balls with a new set (very difficult to do) and then resolder the chip back onto the board again.
We do a lot of reballing on T4x chips, especially the Southbridges because we're finding that the unleaded solder used on them is no longer any good (again it's a big subject) and has to be replaced.
Maybe this does sound like "professionalism" but neither RBS or myself are out to make money by scaring people! All we want to do is to help people and this has extended to offering a couple of services to members who I think find them useful.
Do please keep in touch and let us know how you get on, and if you do have any questions about using the hot air gun please ask.
And have a good holiday too!