[superjohnny]

I have some caps that I soldered on, de-soldered, re-soldered and de-soldered. Now I'm wanting to re-solder them on.

Could I have damaged them in the on/off business?

Thanks!

 

[superjohnny]

Google is my friend: http://www.chemi-con.com/guide/pg14.php

Quote:

2. Applying excessive soldering conditions (time and temperature) beyond the limits specified in the product literature may overheat and damage capacitors. For non-solid aluminum electrolytic capacitors, the solder bath temperature and exposure time, in general, should be limited to 260&C for 10 seconds.

Maybe someone else will read this and benefit. Is there any way to tell if I damaged my caps?

 

[jefemeister]

It depends on how efficient you were in soldering/desoldering them. If you wrestled for a minute with one of the leads while trying to take it off, your chances will be smaller. If you used appropriate tools such as solder wick/sucker/etc and got them off smoothly your chances are better. In general I think you should be OK with caps and resistors, ICs would be a different story. I also imagine that a solder bath is quite different than an iron--sort of like the difference between a hot oven, and a hot stovetop

 

[rickcr42]

I dunno Jeff.

I have seen instances where resistor calues have acually changed due to exess heat and capacitor leads that while looking intact actually separated from the dielectric inside the can

My advice is to ALWAYS use a hot soldering iron with a clean tip and get on/off the joint rapidly

Some of the silver content solders have a high melting point and are a bi*ch to get to flow with anything short of a 40watt iron unless you want to spend some time on the joint which is bad,very bad.

Soldering tips-

1-keep a damp spong handy for wiping the soldering iron tip
2-tin that sucker ! a dull tip means you have an inefficient tip
3-let the soldering iron rest occasionally to build the heat back up
4-tin that sucker

rickmonster