Advice Soldering advice

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It was like that when I got here...
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Not strictly a tech question so I'm putting it here. I'm after some advice with soldering.

My work have a few dozen printers out to sites for the project we're running. I swear a pack of marauding Baboons could do a better job of looking after the equipment. We've currently got in excess of 30 printers in the warehouse that work fine except the USB ports are fucked.
I've bought a single port and taken the comms board out of a printer. I plan to swap the ports out and if it works, order a shit load more ports and do all of them.

Now, this obviously involves soldering, which I've done multiple times but not in this context. I'll provide a picture of the board with a crude circle around the pins. What I need to know is what temperature I should be setting the soldering iron to and what sort of solder I should be using.

Ta!

262555674_1048995005955663_4521149359944567138_n.jpg
 

Tom

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Dec 22, 2003
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Just normal lead-free solder is fine. Set the iron to whatever temperature the solder you buy demands. If you have a desoldering tool then that's a big help, but I usually just use copper braid and a solder sucker.

Use the new solder to get the old solder running, and suck it out once its running. Don't hold the iron on the pins for any longer than 3-4 seconds or you'll damage the board.

Use isopropyl alcohol to clean the socket when you've removed the old port, and use it again once the new port is in, to remove excess flux from the PCB.

BTW, if you don't care about appearances, it might be better in the long run to use a USB female socket on the end of a piece of flex, with a grommet where it enters the printer case. It'd be a lot easier to install and it'd sustain more abuse if tied off inside.

Top tip - look on the board at what's connected to what. Use a multimeter before and after installation to confirm that no tracks were damaged during the soldering process. That way, if you do damage something, you can use bodge wires to reconnect the components to eachother thereby bridging the broken tracks.
 

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