I've never seen a soldering iron where tips are not replaceable. What's cool about cartridge-heater systems like this is how easy it is to hot-swap.
Neither have I, but so far I've only been replacing tips when they get too old, and not as a routine thing.
Well, at the latest with modern SMD components and heat-sucking multilayer boards, the days of a one-size-fits-all soldering tip are over. So you either swap tips as needed, or you have to swap entire irons.
I think berke means heating up metal tweezers so they can desolder.
Yes that's what I meant.
I can’t imagine anyone would think that’s a viable thing to even bother testing! ![Confused :-//](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/confused0024.gif.pagespeed.ce.5xOqKkq0Co.gif)
Well why not? At face value it sounds plausible to me. This idea was suggested in this very forum.
Most tweezers are stainless steel, which is a
terrible conductor of heat (28 times worse than copper, which is what soldering iron tips are made of). And stainless can’t easily be wetted with solder, further compromising heat transfer. So it’d be
really hard to get good heat transfer to the joints.
Ok, so you get brass tweezers: it’s wettable and only 3 times worse a thermal conductor than copper. But now that thermal conductivity is sinking all the heat away into the tweezer grip, cooling the tips and burning your fingers.
I just don’t see any way this could work in practice. Maybe you could do it with a blowtorch and blacksmiths gloves, but not with a soldering iron as a heat source.
In my experience the best ways to remove SMD chip passives are:
1. Preheat the board (ideally with infrared preheater, otherwise by generously preheating the board (over a much larger area than the component to be removed) with a broad nozzle, from both sides) at a lower temperature, so that you can then go in with a smaller nozzle and very low airflow to melt the solder on the affected component.
2. Use a soldering iron tip large enough to cover the entire component, flow a bunch of solder onto the tip, and melt both sides at once. The component then gets pulled off onto the iron tip. This works great for parts that aren’t too closely crowded. Don’t do this if you want to reuse the part.
I’d sooner recommend spending money on a good preheater than on desoldering tweezers. With modern multilayer boards, where the internal ground and power planes suck heat away, a preheater is essential for gentle board repairs — plus they just plain make your life easier.