Note to self and others: use quality soldering equipment

[Sir_Doge]

Confession: Just wasted a $28 keyboard while swapping out its keys. 

Soldering iron was wonky and was leaking AC current. Controller chip got fried.

 

If you are a beginner please check your iron first before working with it.

Sadly wasted 3hrs and $28

[kelvinhall05]

I mean, I agree with your point about using quality equipment. I wouldn't get anything cheaper than a Ksger T12 or in some cases a Pinecil. But I have doubts about the keyboard's cause of death. How did you determine this? Are you sure it's completely fried?

[Sir_Doge]

8 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

I mean, I agree with your point about using quality equipment. I wouldn't get anything cheaper than a Ksger T12 or in some cases a Pinecil. But I have doubts about the keyboard's cause of death. How did you determine this? Are you sure it's completely fried?

Not fried completely. Leds glow but the FN key doesn't work and some other keys start to trigger on their own specially the ones that have a secondary character.

It was a 60% no name keyboard.

[kelvinhall05]

Just now, Sir_Doge said:

Not fried completely. Leds glow but the FN key doesn't work and some other keys start to trigger on their own specially the ones that have a secondary character.

Well, you swapped the switches, didn't you? And what you're describing sounds like a crappy soldering job and/or faulty switches.

[Sir_Doge]

Just now, kelvinhall05 said:

Well, you swapped the switches, didn't you? And what you're describing sounds like a crappy soldering job and/or faulty switches.

The switches were new Kailh Box reds. The keyboard came with some unknown YH branded blue clicky switches.

Soldering was okay I think as there were no bridges and all the joints were shiny.

[trag1c]

All about that Hakko life. Though some of the best tools and equipment I have used are cheapies I would generally agree that high quality equipment from well known brands is the way to go since you can't always trust that cheaper/unknown companies didn't leave the tip floating at some arbitrary voltage.

 

 

[dizmo]

Or in the case of what happened, go hot swappable and avoid the soldering all together.

[Heliian]

I'm a Weller man myself.  

 

 

[Quackers101]

1 hour ago, dizmo said:

Or in the case of what happened, go hot swappable and avoid the soldering all together.

i don't get why this is more of a thing, and why not, hot swappable buttons could be improved further.

but can be quite expensive, then again for any mechnical keyboard.

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Hobby Electronics

[airborne spoon]

If your iron was "leaking AC current" how did you not get shocked? and if you didn't get shocked then how did you discover the iron was faulty? Because what you described sounds a lot like a shitty job of soldering, if the board was powered off while you were working on it a little juice shouldn't hurt anything.

 

I just use a $10 Weller iron and it has worked perfectly for about 15 years so far.

[H713]

Possible that you managed to damage the controller chip with ESD. Any decent iron should have it's tip grounded. If it doesn't, then it's a POS. If it really had 120 VAC on the tip, that controller chip wouldn't work at all. 

 

I used a Hakko FX888 for years, but when I took a job at the University I got to use a Metcal MX500 for a few days. It was such a night-day difference that I shelled out the $300 for a used MX-500 almost immediately.

 

I use the STTC-137 tip for almost everything, including most SMD stuff (though almost everything I do with SMD is SOIC chips and 1206 resistors). If I need to solder big connectors, ground planes with via stitching or anything else with a huge thermal mass, the STTC-117 is amazing. You can solder a TO-220 tab down to the ground plane of a 4-layer board (with via stitching 4 layers of ground plane together) with one. 

 

Also make sure to get some flux and use good quality solder. I like the Kester 63/37 stuff quite a bit. Don't buy the no-clean version- it sucks.

[ColinLTT]

This rings especially true for multimeters as well. If I've whipped out the probes my brain is already working at 100%, I don't need to be worrying if my meter is reading right.