Soldering small components onto PCBs

>>1034148
>UV light (...) to perform solder jobs on this scale.
lol... it's infrared, not UV, and it's professional, definitely not DIY budget.
And you don't need it until BGA/WLCSP, and to be honest, for DIY-purpose hot air still suffices.

You can use normal tools, in general the differences are:
a) Forget about soldering gun (i.e. transformer-based tool), use a soldering iron. You need higher precision; the tip needs to be no more than 1.5mm for a microusb.
b) You need separate flux, even if you use solder with flux
c) You generally don't heat the junction then apply solder, but tin the tip, then apply flux to the junction and touch it with the tip. Elements are small enough to heat instantaneously.

For unsoldering you (usually) need a hot air soldering station. It can be used for soldering, too, but then you need a soldering paste (that is more expensive than solder and you need to store it properly). It's fun to use, but with budget tools and paste be careful not to blow small components away.

In any case, no need to glue components to PCB upon soldering.

Look for soldering vids on youtube, there are tons of these.

>>1034222
Good advice. Tacky flux is good for keeping parts in place and providing the flux.

>>1034148
>I need to solder a few microUSB ports at some point

apply flux to pads
orient your connector to match the 5 pads with tweezers
apply solder liberally
if solder bridge occurs, wick excess off with solder wick

done

btw, most mUSB cons come with little dimples that sit neatly into your boards drill holes so aligning shouldn't be a problem to begin with

>>1034148
you could get yourself a heat gun and some solder paste for smd work

Get 2 soldering irons for SMT

I made the move to SMD this year. With my last project I used a Yihua 858D for SOIC's and like 0805 resistors. Next project is going to use a couple of TSSOP's and a bunch of 0603's so what I am thinking of doing is using a frying pan to basically reflow the whole thing at once ;^)

>>1034148

Look up hot air rework station. Typically those are used for SMDs. You'll need solder mask though depending on how small you go.

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These things will change your life. I'm shit at soldering but using one of these I was fairly easily able to hack some mod wires onto all the used pins on a NAND chip (TSOP, 0.5mm pitch) to attach a logic analyzer.

>>1035231
Is that a regular microscope, or does it have some solder-related gear on it as well?

>>1034148
>I'm already decent at soldering. Pic related is NOT my work.
Thank God! That soldering is such shit I literally felt like vomiting internally.
> I need to solder a few microUSB ports
Regular soldering iron, even a low wattage one will cut it. Don't even fucking think about getting a special "fine" tip for it. Fine tips are a meme that noobs fall for.

Remember kiddies: it's not the tool that does the soldering, it's the man.

>>1035485
While it may look very elaborate it's just a regular microscope with the frame away from the area where you do your work.

In fact! Just a regular hobby/toy microscope will do for SMD work. They have those holder spots for glass sheets which are max comfy for holding your board still with a little bit of tape applied to smooth the grip (no need for the clunky and utterly useless "helping hand" in this case too).

Sorry, don't mean to hijack thread, but have a tangentially related question. I need to replace the eeproms on some TVs; will a Weller cordless iron, desoldering braid, liquid rosin flux, and 0.2mm rosin core lead solder get me there? I am decent at soldering, just never worked this small before.

>>1036009
What form factor are the EEPROMs? If they're through whole you got everything you need (I presume you have some basic tweezers). If they're SMD you're gonna make a bloody mess with solder wick most likely. If the SMD component has leads on only two sides you might try solder balling to heat up the sides and work by 'raising each side until it comes clean off. If there's leads on all four sides it might be a bit trickier to get it to heat evenly with just an iron and a heat gun should be used (you can potentially use a heat gun that people use to remove paint if you don't want to spend money on a professional tier one.. make a 'stencil' from aluminium foil to protect the other components).

>>1036022
that's true