PSA - Solder Sucker (warning-may not be suitable for those with dirty minds)

Engineer brand is a very high qualty (their pliers rival Swiss pliers) tool company. I like their model better than the similar designs I’ve tried, but I certainly haven’t owned more than a few.

A few years ago I treated myself to a Hakko desoldering pistol and some of the specific heads for it, as I was mainly doing SMT projects, and even the solder sucker was too awkward. I’ve only used it a few times, but every time I have, it’s been almost thrilling.
 
Yup yup yup, sure works good. Bought mine a couple months ago, I was so happy when I made a mistake and got to use it. Really seriously cleans that solder up.....
 
HamishR said:
Well I guess they might be handy if you are one of those people who makes mistakes. Or one of those weirdos who wants to try values other than those prescribed by the circuit gods.
Click to expand...
Which reminds me. A user on Freestompboxes posted about their versions of the Fuzzrite. They were Very proud of what they accomplished. They changed all the cap values and ended up with both the Si and Ge version sounding exactly the same and nothing like a Fuzzrite, just generic fuzz. What a weirdo.
 
kweefthief said:
do i need one of these to desolder a pot or will i be ok with a good ol wick
Click to expand...
I've desoldered pots with it but it's not pretty. Best way to replace pots (depending on whether you want to preserve the board) is to snip the legs as close to the board as possible, then suck the solder out and remove what's left of the leg one at a time with a little heat. Then the sucker can clean out the rest of the hole. You can reuse the pot by soldering some little leg extensions back on.
 
MichaelW said:
I've desoldered pots with it but it's not pretty. Best way to replace pots (depending on whether you want to preserve the board) is to snip the legs as close to the board as possible, then suck the solder out and remove what's left of the leg one at a time with a little heat. Then the sucker can clean out the rest of the hole. You can reuse the pot by soldering some little leg extensions back on.
Click to expand...
I did this with one of my first builds I was struggling to get the pots to stay in the board and they all came out didn’t realize they got shuffled and soldered my gain as my tone pot and my tone pot as my gain. Didn’t notice until I was testing it. Had to cut the legs off. Ended up using those pots in a vero build just soldered the wire in and use some heat shrink just to be overly cautious.
 
I've been using the Engineer one for a while now and I love it. When I started I was using one of those cheap blue ones from Amazon that comes in a three pack for like $10 and it was miserable. I'm glad I made the upgrade. It's one of those things that just works, which is nice.
 
Thanks to this post I dusted off my solder sucker and gave it another try, while modding my Derailer yesterday. It worked perfectly. The last time I had used it was fairly early on, in my soldering journey and I was probably doing many things wrong. I had assumed the solder sucker was gimmic, but after seeing this thread I decided to give it another go. Thanks.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top