ohh, ok, ouch! I did a mod to a FTT, Poppas S7 from Manafont, that had the "hollow pill" (nothing behind the LED PCB), and back-filled it with a brass pill grinded down, then press fit in just right... - pain of a job but got it worked out pretty well. Chicago-X has the super lathe so he can do pretty much anything, wonder if he worked something out for that light.
I stacked my first last week, its not so bad. I did get a heat shunt from maplin, I dont know if its necessary, but their two quid, and helpful for holding the chips at least. You don’t have to solder the centre pin, its common to the heat tag at the top of the chip, I tinned the pins first too and used a 40w iron. Hope this helps.
I hold the new chip in place and bend the legs down until they almost touch the existing chip. With a tiny bit of flux the solder bridges that little gap. Seems easy to me (with a properly size soldering iron tip) and I’m not great w/ soldering…at all.
it might. but a proper iron is more important, and solder core flux, or the tiniest amount of flux that you can put right on the leg is sufficient, imho
oh, and a magnifying glass can help.
I also find it helpful to have it set up so that my hand has something steady to rest on or push against - ie no shaking…
It should do, I just use normal rosin? Solder from maplin, I just realised your in Ireland, do you have one near by? Failing that, any electrical suppliers will carry the bits you need. For stuff like this, I prefer to go local tbh, just so I can have a butcher’s at what I’m getting.
All good advice, its one of them, get the bits to make the job easy and you’ll be successful, try to hodge, you’ll struggle and maybe not be successful. Those helping hands are good, let me find a link to show you what I mean……
here’s a shot of my ghetto rigged helping hands, along with a driver w/ a some chips added
The helping hands thing is from harborfreight (~$3?) and it moved to easily when using it, so I cut the end off an empty propane bottle, hot glued that to a 5lb weight, then hot glued the helping hands to the bottle S) I also used heavy copper wire to add length to the arms.
I expect you can find something similar locally for less than shipping, but for reference (and of course, you can spend a lot more, and get a lot more)
My AMC 7135 chips arrived today, so i got to work on my Shadow SL3. I soldered 11 chips in. I left the 12th one for now as i’d had enough for one night, and the last one has the negative cable attached, so might have been too fiddly for this time of night.