one of them days.. where all is difficult, video, sparks and stuff..

[oz2cpu]

15 sec video

todays troubles :

https://youtu.be/3s1_pHp0vxg

[rsjsouza]

We've all been there... It will pass.

Two Fridays ago I was slated to do an antenna matching on three boards, which involves constantly removing/soldering various 0201 passives and doing measurements on a VNA at each iteration. Something that should have taken about 1-1/2 hour, took me three hours with two boards missing parts and a third one with a ripped track (progress: 0%). Fortunately I was able to resume successfully on Monday with a very cold head.

[vk6zgo]

We've all been there... It will pass.

Two Fridays ago I was slated to do an antenna matching on three boards, which involves constantly removing/soldering various 0201 passives and doing measurements on a VNA at each iteration. Something that should have taken about 1-1/2 hour, took me three hours with two boards missing parts and a third one with a ripped track (progress: 0%). Fortunately I was able to resume successfully on Monday with a very cold head.

Yep, like pushing capacitors about that size around on RF amplifier boards with toothpicks, while watching their swept frequency response.

I would just get one in the right spot & it would slip out from under the toothpick, mostly disappearing down into the guts of the transmitter, where there was some hope of retrieval, but sometimes flipping high enough to land on the floor.
Even grovelling on the floor didn't find them, then.

The worst thing was that I thought I had left that sort of thing behind back in the early 1980s, when I worked in a (far better equipped) place where we tuned a lot of solid state PAs.
"Yes, Virginia, they had surface mount capacitors in the 1980s---we used to call'em 'chip capacitors'! "

[rsjsouza]

I would just get one in the right spot & it would slip out from under the toothpick, mostly disappearing down into the guts of the transmitter, where there was some hope of retrieval, but sometimes flipping high enough to land on the floor.
Even grovelling on the floor didn't find them, then.

Indeed the darn things tend to get statically attracted to the most incredible things and can jump like fleas, especially when being removed form the cut tape. Another problem is that when two parts fall into the transmitter but you couldn't locate the first. When the second falls, you can never tell which one is which anymore. That is another issue I have here as well - when I forget to sweep the bench before working, I can't even use the parts that fall in the table as they might be from someone else's project (the soldering stations are shared).