Modding a desoldering iron into an SMD iron

[lincolnic]

I have no intention of doing this myself, but I came across this and thought some of you guys would get a kick out of it: http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/07/how-to-make-a-surface-mount-soldering-iron/

[Ettore_M]

AWESOME! that's quite nice and clever too. But how much does it all cost with the pump? Sure it goes cheaper than a SMD soldering station but is it worth it? Maybe I should try it and see..

Hector

[pickdropper]

I dunno, there are some really cheap Chinese hot air rework stations that are actually built for this task.

A line in their conclusion made me laugh and scratch my head at the same time:

"Working with surface mount hardware has been a recurring challenge for us. We hate to admit it, but we may have actually resorted to crushing certain SMD resistors to enable some features in our hardware"

Crushing parts to disable them?  Ouch.

[lincolnic]

I dunno, there are some really cheap Chinese hot air rework stations that are actually built for this task.

A line in their conclusion made me laugh and scratch my head at the same time:

"Working with surface mount hardware has been a recurring challenge for us. We hate to admit it, but we may have actually resorted to crushing certain SMD resistors to enable some features in our hardware"

Crushing parts to disable them?  Ouch.

I can't quite remember what the devices were, but in my old TV production job, one of the engineers would remove a SMD resistor from certain devices to allow them to do HD video capture. Whatever they're doing in the article is probably a similar situation.