LFC#199 - SMD Soldering Crash Course With Amateur Equipment

[Music] hello interwebs welcome to let's fix computers I just watched Jays two cents this is Jay's two cents is his most recent video where he was fixing his Titan V I think it was RTX Titan V big expensive graphics card he had previously used it in an overclocking competition during which he had applied liquid metal across the current sensing resistor in order to trick the card into thinking it was using less power than it actually was thus enabling him to use even more power and reach higher clock speeds and he needed to remove that modification to the card and unfortunately while he was doing so he accidentally broke off the current sense resistor so firstly this is not a Titan V I've never seen one of those this is a gtx 960 and the eagle-eyed ones among you might recognize it as that one card that i did the really bajji repair on we're actually gonna fix this thing properly at some point not today I'm still waiting on parts I'm waiting for some new MOSFETs to show up from China they're taking ages anyway um I've removed the current Sims resistor so what we've done here is I'm reproducing the fault that Jay had where he accidentally broke off the current sense resistor and so let's pretend that you're not familiar with soldering with soldering and on your graphics card or some other component maybe on your laptop or something like that you've just dinked a component and he's popped off the board you're like oh I'm screwed you know nightmare situation so this is the situation that Jay was in basically he accidentally dint a component off his $2,500 graphics card and was like balls I've just broken this graphics card so he said Jamie's video he made note that he couldn't really find many research information on how to deal with this and there's plenty on YouTube to be honest but perhaps he just didn't know because obviously in YouTube it's such a sea of information that is hard to find something that you consider trustworthy at the very least this video is not about me flexing on Jay because I consoled her obviously I can't flex on Jay he's leagues above me however what I wanted to do is I do know how to solder so I thought I'd demonstrate how I would have responded to this situation now obviously as he discovered in the video where he broke the graphics card his comment section then immediately got swarmed by all of the armchair technicians who go oh you need to send it to such-and-such a lot of people said send it to Luis Rossman great idea by the way you know you'd be able to sort it out but a lot of people says all you need to do this that and the other and oh it's really easy you just need to do this and oh you need to buy all this expensive equipment so the thing is expensive soldering equipment is better it does make the job much easier however it's not critical and the other thing as well is though in the real world people who are stuck in this nightmare situation they're not going to rush out and buy $700 worth of equipment to fix it especially when you could just pay someone else to repair it at that cost so what Jay had done he went out to his nearest hardware store and bought a cheap-ass soldering iron and as soon as he took that soldering iron out and put it on the tech desk I was like oh what is that you've bought however he was like I did what any normal person would do I went to Lowe's I bought a soldering iron and some solder also screw that motorbike in particular being obnoxiously loud anyway he did what any normal person would do and he just bought a soldering iron and he tried to solder it now he did actually get it done so kudos to him and I you know yes it was a little bit sketchy to watch however hacking good job because you had to go and you did it and I'm a big believer in that so in this video I've got a really sketchy soldering iron and I'm gonna try and fix it using a sketchy soldering iron so firstly let's take a look at the ions that I've put that I've got in front of me I'm gonna explain some differences between them so let's jump to that scene firstly my normal weapon of choice is this this is a TS 100 these things are about I don't know 60 or 70 dollars maybe might be a bit cheap and that might be 50 dollars these days he's been around for quite a while this soldering on by the time you've bought some accessories for it I would be budgeting about $100 you know 100 pounds or so for it and buy a couple of accessories I mean a couple of different tips and a power supply for it because and this guy typically doesn't come with a power supply and you've got to power it from a DC supply incidentally a Toshiba laptop charger a 65 watt Toshiba laptop charger is perfectly fine to power one of these it'll plug right into the back the Toshiba put charger will fit that connector and it'll give it adequate power it's not full power this guy will run up to this guy will run up to 24 volts however it will give it enough to be completely functional and get up to maximum temperature so yeah this is my normal weapon of choice I have a knife edge tip on it let me give you a close-up shot so you can see what tip I have and why it's a good tip so as you can see the tip I have here is a wedge and well III it's a knife edge basically so it's it's not going to cut your hand open but as you can see it's got it ends in two sharp points and the important thing is there because we've got this slope on the edge of there the problem with very small tips is that you can't get the heat of the iron all the way down to the tip whereas on this one because we've got these two slopes on the sides of it we can now by comparison let me grab another let me grab a really fine point tip which iron that's not it is it no ah here it is here's a fine point tip one of my other irons this thing is rubbish because it ends in a very fine point tip and you've got to get you know you've got to get like four 350 to 400 degrees centigrade down to that very tip and because there's no metal down there there's not enough thermal mass to get the heat into the thing you need to solder which means this tip is actually incredibly difficult to use which is why I never use it so and then a typical soldiering iron will probably have just a fair the average tip like this on it so this one as you can see again it's a pointed but if I compare it to that one I just showed you where's it gone I literally just threw it away and discussed no it's gone I come parrot to the TS 100 so you've got basis of comparison so as you can see the TS 100 because it's got that straight flat edge there's a much more metal and it gives me even greater precision at its very tip but it also gives me that big flat space to apply heat so that's why this knife edge tip is so good and this is fine for hobbyists stuff if you're like doing a solder and kill something like that it will be absolutely fine however when you start getting down to SMD work this guy will be a bit of a hard job so now here's the third option so this is a this is an ant x12 what soldering I'm I don't know why I bought this it was before I knew anything about soldiering I bought it from them Macklin's which is our equivalent of a Radio Shack but yeah this thing's got quite a fine tip on it but as you can see look at the state of that I think I've used this about twice and never ever cleaned it so this is our worst case scenario solder align this most people anyone in the audience who knows anything about soldiering will take one look at the soldering iron and go what the hell is that you do not have a hope in hell with that well maybe they'll be right we'll find out let's see if we can do it so finally this one more thing I want to point out and in the selection of good versus crap soldering irons is these two soldering lines both have a thing in common that this one is different about so on this soldering on this has an interchangeable tip on it if I unscrew this bit here and remove the tip that is the actual heating element there that's the bit that heats up and the tip is going on the end of it there and then this collar sits across the hot top the whole thing and just presses it against the heating element now there's not very good thermal contact between the tip and the heating element and you lose an awful lot of heat just getting to the end of the soldering iron so that's why these soldering irons are not very good they work but they're just in when you get to a professional level these things are pretty bad however it's possible now by comparison the TS 100 if I just swap out two I've got a wedge tip here for it this is one of the replacement tips for the TS 100 now notice that we're replacing the entire section it so the whole thing is a single piece of metal with the heating element in the tip and it gets its power from these terminals so the power goes through and the heating element is physically inside the tip where it'll all be bonded together so all of that heat is going straight into the tip and that's one of the reasons why this little TS 100 is such a powerful soldiering iron despite its diminutive size now when you use really posh expensive soldering irons like heck oh hey chose hack OHS and stuff like that you'll get the same thing the entire tip will be replaceable as a single unit like this and that's one of the things that makes those soldering iron so much better so now I've told you a thing or two about soldering irons this is why people say are you need this soldering iron however I'm guessing that you guys don't have a good soldering iron lying around so we're gonna try and use the crap once so I'm not gonna use the TS 100 that's an easy mode I'm going to try and do it with this piece of garbage and if that doesn't work I'll resort to this one so this soldering iron is part this one is temperature controlled is part of my WEP two-in-one station and you can buy a soldiering on like this on ebay for I don't know 40 or 50 quid tops so probably the equivalent in dollars you know 40 or 50 bucks and you'll have a temperature controlled soldering iron with a replaceable tip like this but again the point of this video is that I'm assuming you're going to be in a desperate situation where you you know if you had money you'd be getting it fixed by a professional anyway so you're probably gonna use just whatever you can get your hands on because you're desperate so let's try this thing I this might be a waste of time but let's find out so the first thing I've got to do is plug it in and warm it up these these non-regulated soldering irons where you've just got a mains plug going straight into the soldiering iron no temperature control box or anything like that they have no control of them and they tend to take a very long time to heat up so I'm gonna get it plugged in and I'm gonna wait a good 10 or 15 minutes for it to heat up so let's plug it in right that's plugged in so while we wait for that this is a soldering iron holder I've got this came with my 2 in one kit and your soldering iron may have come with some kind of rudimentary holder it might have come with something similar to this it might come with just a folding bit of metal that sticks up and you just rest the iron on it like that kind of thing those are not very good but again if in a pinch is fine one thing I do recommend doing most so very much will probably come with a sponge this is just a kitchen wire wool scratchy go down to your local supermarket and buy a 2-pack of these for a dollar or a pound or something like that these are much better at cleaning tips than the sponges so I recommend using one of these and as I say just buy one of these from the supermarket and literally just wire tie it to your holder and now you've got something you can use to clean the tip properly so I'm going to leave this to heat up I'm gonna put it in there just so well it loosely fits I'm gonna put it in there I'm gonna leave it to hook it up and then the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try and salvage that tip and so yeah while we wait for that other things I've got I've got a salt I've got a spool of solder here this is the solder I use daily it's quite a thick solder for SMD work you want the thinnest stuff than this but this is just what I have you want leaded solder with a flux core that will make your life significantly easier so again if you have a choice of what kind of solder you're buying get leaded with flux if you've got like some grassy old stuff like this is ancient this is probably 40 years old this solder you can see where all the flux has bubbled up our there and the really old soldier like this is probably better than the newest stuff because it's got all of the glourious not good for your health chemicals in it so yeah the other thing that people will often see me using I've got some ebay flux here it says it's Amtech I doubt it's actually antic however this also makes life easier but again it makes it easier but it's not critical I will not be using this today because it's cheating so I can feel the heat coming off that that's warming up I'm gonna leave it for a bit longer let's see how this thing is doing so the way we're going to check if we're up to temperature is we're gonna try and not some solder on it so I'll just touch some solder to the tip yeah we go that's working so I'm going to put some solder on the tip of the iron and then I'm gonna clean it using the wire wool I'm just gonna dig it around in there and just just scrape it all off basically okay that's coming up quite nicely let's do that again so this is known as tinning where you're applying a fresh layer of tin onto the tip of the iron and there's various people who drone on about taking good care of your soldering iron tips and stuff like that and as long as you keep the tip reasonably clean it's fine I mean you'll notice like I don't clean my iron every single time I put it away you don't need to it'll be fine and plus like that TS 100 new tips for that soldering iron are like $10 on Aliexpress if I kill a tip who cares I'll buy another one anyway yeah this has cleaned up quite nicely it looks like just the last time I used it I just put it away and discussed and didn't didn't clean it up I was like Dell with this thing so that's that tip is now cleaned up nicely you can see we've got the we can see we've got a nice tinder tip there which is good because the solder that will shrug off the solder because you don't want the solder to stick to the iron you want it to stick to the subject so okay that looks good okay so with that out of the way I've got my I've got my soldering iron all warmed up and we've cleaned it up so let us now attempt to repair this so we've got to put this back onto these pads here now firstly on this particular graphics card this is quite enclosed area however this plastic connector we can easily remove that when you've got a connector like this with some pins sticking up the plastic bit that'll slide right off so if I just get a metal prying tool metal spudger like this and I'm just gonna stick that under there and just ease that off just step it out there we go take note of which way round it goes now we've moved that bit of plastic out the way which means we're not gonna melt it or anything like that so firstly it's not critical to know what the component is that you've broken off but it's helpful to understand what you've got the most common SMD components are going to see these are capacitors and this thing here this is the current sense resistor now what you'll notice is it has four pads and what we've got here is we've got the power coming from this power connector is going through this resistor and then to the rest of the power system the two smaller pads these two here will go back to the power management controller on this the the power controller chip so this resistor will have a very low resistance quite likely it's like 0.5 of an ohm or 0.05 of an own very very low resistance and what will happen is the voltage going across this resistor will drop ever so slightly and the more power that is going through the resistor the more that voltage will go down but it will only drop by a tiny tiny amount which is not enough to disrupt the thing that's being powered from it however that voltage drop is enough to be sensed to be detected so these two pins here these are going back to the to the map power management chip that will sense a tiny voltage drop across this resistor and by sensing that voltage drop it can calculate how much power the graphics card is using so it can sense how many it can calculate the answer and the watts that are passing across this and us how many watts are being pulled through this connector and that lets the graphics card know how much power is available to it so the resistor itself only actually has two pads these pads are joined at both ends so you might ask yourself well why is there four pin why is there four pins then well the answer to that is the closer your sense pads get to the resistor itself the more accurate the measurement is and so they don't want these to touch they don't want these two terminals to be touching right until you get to the actual resistor and it's quite common for current sensing resistors to actually have four pads on them as well so you're getting eat right into the package of the resistor before your sense what lines are actually touching the power lines however they do need to touch at some point so on this resistor it's only got two terminals on it one at each end so these pads will actually be joining at the resistor so we don't need to worry about these joining together because they will do in that solder blob anyway so that's the first thing this is the first part where Jay went wrong well he didn't go wrong because he fixed it but that wasn't that was something that he misinterpreted is he was concerned about these two touching each other whereas in reality they'll be touching each other once you get to the resistor anyway so that's not a big deal so what we need to do now is put that on there now a lot of people will be like oh you need a hot-air station got a hot air that on it's like we don't have that we've got this Toxie 12 what the soldiering iron now this is what we have to work with so how do you sold the SMD stuff with a soldering iron the the technique is quite simple what you need to do is you need to try and remove as much solder from the pads as you can these are already quite low where this has been machined solder so there's not much to it so I'll just touch up those pads and just make sure they're nice and clean oh yeah that's not even going melt in here so what we're going to do firstly is we're going to solder this from and then the other and so I'm gonna get my solder and we're gonna put a little pillow of leaded solder on one end so I'm just gonna hold the soldering iron against the pad and just put in bit of solder and we'll just let that flow there you go so that's flowed onto the pad and we'll just do the other pad as well can I use that solder again not really let's put a bit more on just a little bit this solder is too big there we go so now I've got two shiny pillows of solder on one side don't do the other side yet we want the other side to be as flat as possible and so now we'll get this guy in position and now what I need to do is I need to reheat those solder blobs and let the components sit down on them so let's heat those up and just put a note to this going to place and this is where I need to start fighting the iron because the iron does not have enough thermal mass to properly heat everything up here so I'm starting to have difficulty getting the solder to melt because I don't have enough heat if I had a bigger soldering iron or a better soldering iron I wouldn't have this problem right now that's where the expensive stuff comes into play so let's try and get those guys moving again it's not gonna happen once you've got the solder molten you're laughing but while it won't flow is difficult so what I'll do is I'll put a bit more solder in there and that's going to help me get more thermal mass into there to hold the heat for longer so now we've got everything moving again and then notice that into place notice that alarm try and hold it down oh it's gun sideways where the solder is not melting properly this iron is horrifyingly bad there little loop buff right now it's on I'm gonna go a little bit further and just try and straighten that up slightly if anyone else was doing this I would say quit while you're ahead then we go right and that's on on one end and I'll just quickly show you what that looks like I'll clean the iron in my in my why we'll put that away so as you can see we're not sitting directly flat on the board but that's very difficult to do with the equipment that we've actually got to hand so all of that black schmutz that's from the burnt flux and all the other slag don't worry about that we'll clean that up in a moment however we've got a good solid connection that is soldered on that's not coming off I can nudge that with my fingernail there and that's not coming off so that's all good now we need to get the other end so now I'll turn this around soldering iron out and we're just gonna feed some solder under the component there with the iron in place and because there's no heat there the soldered blob doesn't want to flow because the metal is cold let's try and get some more in there there we go is it going it's trying just holding the side of the iron under there there we go so notice how I'm using the edge of the iron and not the tip because the actual tip is gonna do bugger-all I can press that tip into that and nothing will happen but if I hold the edge of the tip in there we get far more heat transfer and it heats and starts flowing like that right let's see if we can remove that solder blob I'm gonna turn it around I'm just gonna try and get rid of this guy he's not doing anyone any harm but I think I can get rid of it let me go and again there we go clean the tip okay and there is a rough as gut solder job it's not prissy however that is electrically solid now and it's not gonna come off again again flip that with your fingernail not coming off so what I'll do now now we kind of want to clean this area up a bit all of this noise is from other repairs I've been doing to this board now to clean up soldering stuff I would normally use isopropyl alcohol which you can buy the bottle yeah you can buy this in bottles from Amazon this is 99.9 percent proof stuff so it's the it's this is I don't say laboratory grade but it's high grade stuff is decent and 99% or 99.5 is probably fine as well when you get the lower grade stuff like a 70 or 80% that's known as rubbing alcohol it's a poor man's isopropyl basically it's probably good enough to all intent and purpose if it's worth having this stuff lying around but it's really good for cleaning things if you don't have any though add a push window and glass spray this stuff it evaporates very quickly which means it's good for cleaning up electronics so it's perfectly safe to use a little bit of this I'm just gonna squid spritz that on just like that and now I'm gonna get a toothbrush and just scrub that clean and I'll dry it off there we go so as you can see it doesn't look terribly pretty but that is on it's electrically sound that is a fixed graphics card and then as a final thing we could put the connector back on and that would be the job done and that is your basic way of doing an SMD repair with a garbage soldiering on so when people say you have to buy a really expensive soldering I know you don't it'll make it easier if you do it will make your life easier but you don't have to so it can be done with cheap equipment and that's how you do it basically and that is a rough as guts but perfectly functional repair now just for funsies as demonstration I'll show you the you know the correct way of doing it and so what we're gonna do now I'm going to take this back off and I'm gonna put it on as if I were fixing it with my more modest my modest equipment which is my TS 100 basically so let's remove this again now removing an SMD component with a soldering iron is quite difficult to do it can be done on the small stuff like small components like this capacitor here that kind of thing you can just put a giant solder blob on there and just blob the whole thing away and melt it into oblivion however that's not really practical if you want to take that off of the board now realistically you don't you don't have a good chance of doing that with a soldering iron without doing some damage the correct way to remove that is with a hot-air gun so now I'm gonna get out my hot air station so let's take this back off the board so I can demonstrate a cleaner repair so I'm gonna go in with the hot set so for those of you don't know the hot air gun this is spewing out a stream of air of 400 degrees C so it's gonna melt everything in its line of sight so again we're just gonna apply the heat onto their weight and as soon as that solder melts I'll just be able to lift that right off with the tweezers there we go and off it comes I'll put that to one side and now I'm just gonna swap out my soldering irons and we'll start cleaning all of this up and make it look nice and schmick so just as a point of comparison the crap soldering iron that took about it took about ten minutes to get up to temperature or so five or ten minutes it wasn't as painful as I thought bigger iron might have taken longer but just as a comparison this is a TS 120 let me just turn that up a bit 224 just to give it maximum power this is a TS 100 heating up and it gives you an idea of how much quicker and I like this it so if I press the button to start heating and watch that temperature saw so 200 300 400 that is ready to use and we'll just plug that in as you can see it's ready to go so I'll just turn up that tip just to get it nice and shiny and ready to go so as you can see a decent soldering iron and this isn't a super expensive one either you can just see how just spending that amount alone will get you orders of magnitude above one of those garbage soldering irons so well I say you don't need to buy an expensive hako and stuff like that but getting something like a TS 100 if you do any kind of soldering on any kind of regularity really good idea so I'm now going to use this solder wick just to remove all of the solder from this area so we can get down to some nice whoops knocking the camera so we can get down some nice stuff so what the solder wick is it's braid is just copper braid and it absorbs it soaks up so excess solder like a sponge and I'm gonna combine that with some flux which is also gonna help the solder flow so put a bit of flux on that and now we're going to soak up all of this solder so we can start again with fresh stuff and straight away with the extra equipment I'm just cutting through this solder like butter where's the other one I was having to hold it down to get heat into it you were seeing how much trouble I was having with it whereas this one you're just going straight in there and just burning through the solder to take all of that up until we've right down to just the tin pads I put quite a lot of solder on to get that job done so we've got quite a lot to take up here I'm just trimming off the end and soaking up new stuff and now I'll just run the iron over all those pads just to make them nice and ready there we go clean the iron okay and now what I'm gonna do now I could use the same technique where I just well actually I will use the same technique so we'll just put just a dash of solder on these two pads oh yeah I need to clean up the need to clean up the resistor as well so I just quickly give this guy a quick run over put some new burn holes in my map that'll loop okay and once again I'm just gonna nudge this into place and because the solder pads are dead flat now we'll actually be able to get this guy to go completely flat so I'll press that down and heat that's one side done and now we need just a touch on the other side and finally this time and now finally I'm going to use the alcohol to clean up so alcohol to brush there we go and as you can see while still visibly hand-soldered that is a much much cleaner job the solder blobs are smaller the device is completely flat on the board and there's no excess there's just no excess solder there at all so that's the effect of using good equipment and how much easier it is as well you can see how just everything was easier when I was working on it and that was with my modest mid-range tools so that gives you an idea of the difference so in summary doing a fix on a god of graphics card with crap equipment is absolutely possible and you know it's not about I mean practice will obviously help a lot however technique is far more important than practice if you have the right technique it will be easier the reason why I made this video is when I was watching when I was watching Jay work on it and again nothing doing to Jay everyone's an expert of their own field but I was watching him he was pressing the soldering iron down on top of it like that kind of just sort of hoping for the best and I'm like no that's not gonna work you need to get the heat from the iron into the device so you need to get a nice big side edge and get it right up against the solder that you're actually trying to melt you can't rely on just holding that tip down on top and just hoping that the just hoping that it'll just laser the energy in there so that's that and that is the basics of doing SMD soldering work I've demonstrated how to do it with amateur equipment and how to do it with the mid-range equipment like the stuff that I use everyday and again if you had a super expensive soldering iron that's going to make your life even easier as well so you might ask yourself well if I had such an easy job then why might you buy super expensive equipment over the midrange stuff that I have well the answer to that is if we take my hot air station for example it's this cheap old thing here this is the equivalent of using the crap soldering iron the heating element is in here and it's got a fan there that blows the air through when you use an expensive hot air station I think the heating element is still in the end I'm not 100% certain but the fan that is all in the actual unit itself so you have a big old hose attached to it and the effect that you get from that is that you get more airflow a cleaner air flow with less turbulence in it so it doe rekt better and less heat loss because I can set this thing to 400 degrees indicated but the air coming out the end of it is probably no in near 400 degrees and that's why I tend to run my soldering equipment like this hot air station and my soldering irons I tend to run them quite hot you know 400 degrees theoretically there's gonna be a couple of people out there who like our solder actually melt so it like 320 you don't need your iron to be that hot I'm like when you have crapper equipment you do when you've got really posh equipment you can have the temperature lower and that gives you more control as well however if you have lower end equipment like this you can turn the temperature up and it will make it easier for you but also just remember that when you start messing around with temperature like I could turn this up to like 480 degrees and you can say oh well you've got more heat that makes it easier right ah a 400 degree 480 degrees you're gonna start destroying the motherboard you'll get all of the all of the actual pads and the copper traitors will start lifting away from the board and damaged like that so as I say you do still need to be careful however I'm rambling now there's a long and complicated discussion to be had over equipment and the pros and cons are there but I hope that this video is just giving you guys a crash course in what to do in a panic situation so I hope that was kind of interesting thank you very much for watching and congratulations to Jay good job doing that soldering job because I'm sure I know you had a lot of haters in your comments on that one don't listen to a man well done for soldering it see y'all next time everyone bye for now you

Channel: Adamant IT

Views: 50,105

Rating: 4.8745389 out of 5

Keywords: adamant it, adamantit, computer, repair, shop, custom, gaming, modding

Id: GzBAv_puMDM

Length: 38min 11sec (2291 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020