Project 65XE: Chip Removal

Entry posted by Osgeld September 10, 2017

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Nothing too much today, I have the schematics all drawn up for the mods I want to do (video, internal SIO2SD, 512k ram, dual pokey), going to review those tonight and work on the pcb anyway far enough along I can go ahead and order a pile o parts ...

side tangent, when I was younger there were a couple, one stop electronics shops around ... like mini digikeys, I would drive downtown hope they had everything I wanted, and most the time they did, and drive back ... now I order online cause those shops are long gone but it sucks when you forget something cause instead of a short drive its often a pile of postage and a few days wait ... least I KNOW they have what I want but it just kind of sucks cause you want to make sure you have everything in that cart before committing

anywho since those parts are on the way I went ahead and removed the chips I need to remove, they are soldered in place of course. I need to remove the pokey, the mmu, the cpu and the pia, which is 80 pins on a motherboard most people call fragile.

I set the temp on my soldering iron to a not low but not as hot as I usually solder at temp, and loaded up the usual array of tools. Flux, solder sucker, solder braid and removed as much solder as humanly possible ... course there is always a little bit of solder gripping a few pins you can never really reach. One can sit there with braid and solder trying to get the surface tension to snag hold of it but heat for long time = lifted pads.

My magic wand however is my el-cheapo hot air station which will easily melt anything still holding on and the chip falls right out of the board. Once out I flux over the pads with a pin and clean up whatever is left with braid, and wipe it all down clean

took about 2 hours, not setting any speed records here, but also not using my solder sucking iron and being extra careful, all is well, I also went ahead and put a 20 pin socket in the mmu spot, its not going to have a big pcb as only a wire or 2 has to connect to it, so something like a machined socket is overkill