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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.

image

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

image

There are also some inexpensive vacuum desoldering tools, like:

image

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

  • I've owned a couple of the manual spring action types but they eventually broke.  It should be said they were plastic and not as robust looking as your first picture.  For what it's worth they worked reasonably well before they broke.

  • 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.