What’s the best method? Or how do you do it?
I am trying to replace a driver in a c8 but don’t know of a good way of removing the driver. I am trying to desolder the connection from the edge of the nanjg board to the pill but the pill is pulling the heat away too fast and the solder won’t melt.
I think you might find a desoldering wick or a solder sucker helpful…
Did you tin your soldering iron with solder so that it conducts heat well?
Also, if the driver has holes in the sides, you can pry it out with a sharp object.
Good luck!
Thanks for the suggestion, I think I’ll try the desoldering wick and maybe it will just pull away a bit at a time. I did try some solder on the tip but it just added more solder instead.
Anyone else have some recommendations?
Or if you don’t care about the original driver being intact, you may get a negative (-) screwdriver and slam it in one corner of the driver to make it flip out. Good luck.
Use solder flux and a hot, hot, hot iron. What is the wattage of your soldering iron?
Desoldering braid (aka desoldering wick) helps a lot. Really does.
I prefer a sucker or pump myself, and I feel you want a 40w iron to give enough heat.
Get the pill in a vice (careful not to damage anything) find something that will assist carefully leavering the driver out, tin the iron tip, clean on a damp sponge then add a little more solder to the tip for heat transfer. Apply heat to the solder points and use the sucker/braid to remove excess solder, once its pretty cleaned up, apply your leaver and again heat near the lever point. Carefully work your way round and the driver should come out. Try to work fast and not let too much heat build up or you may toast the driver. Also de solder the leads from led before starting incase they are tight in there.
I have removed dozens of drivers maybe even hundreds and I don’t use heat at all. I use an x-acto knife and cut around the edge of the driver all the way around as deep as I can go without cutting myself and than I pry the driver off once I cut as much of the solder away as I possibly can with the knife. Good Luck.
I have a variable temp one that gets up to 800+ so I don’t think heat is the issue. It is just so well heatsinked with the large pill.
I went out to my local radioshack and they didn’t have the desoldering wick so I think I’ll try to use the knife method. If it doesn’t work, I’ll probably just pry it out, drivers are only a few bucks.
Thanks for the suggestions
Thanks Erik. I've taken a lot of notes from you on builds, as well as nailbender and others.
Now I build my P60 drop-ins and other mods. Had P60 drop-in with an XP-G2 in a dive light which I used cave diving recently. Works great.