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What's your favorite through-hole desoldering tool?

scottiebabe

I have a $5 solder sucker that is nothing fancy for desoldering through hole components. For occasional use it works well enough I suppose.

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There appears to be a number of "fancier" solder suckers on the market like this made in japan model:

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There are also some inexpensive vacuum desoldering tools, like:

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I don't know if it is total junk or a diamond in the rough...

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  • in reply to scottiebabe

    I have them all and I'm equally inept with all of them. Laughing  The one above - the soldering pencil / vacuum plunger - is probably the one I use the most.  I've given up completely on the non-heated solder suckers (probably have 4).  The squeeze bulb type used to be the "Go To" until I discovered the unit above.  I've also got a unit like Andrew_J but I rarely pull it out.  Maybe if I had better space management skills I would have room for it on the workbench.  I do fire it up when I'm harvesting components, but seldom otherwise.  Only recently, I've had success with solder braid.  Maybe I just got lucky this time or maybe it's because I got a new tin of flux and wasn't skimping on using it.

  • in reply to kmikemoo

    Thank you for sharing your desoldering experiences! Now I am intrigued I only found out just today these heated suckers even exist, perhaps if I find one cheap enough I will have to take a chance on it.

  • in reply to scottiebabe

    I used regular solder suckers for more than a decade with mixed results. Most of the time desoldering components was a struggle. Then I started using desoldering braid+flux, and that was an improvement.

    Last year, however, I bought one of these heated solder suckers and it's made things SO much better. It's not perfect, and sometimes you'd still need to do some cleanup with copper braid, or heat up the joint with a heat gun to pull the component away from the board, but the heated sucker surely reduces the work and frustration by quite a lot, and quickly became one of the best tools I bought last year.

    EDIT: I just realized this is an ancient discussion. However, since, someone recently commented here I got the notification, and felt compelled to reply too, lol.