Removing switches from a double sided PCB.

Snip the legs of the switch, if you can get at them easily, then remove each leg by itself. This works best when legs are kinked in the feed-through holes.

Destroy the switch body if you have to to get at the legs if they are kinked. Otherwise you run the real risk of pulling out the feed-through copper tube(s).

John :-#)#

A solder pot is the usual method. You might fake one from a pipe cap or something. Amazon and ebay have solder pots too.

Masking around the switch and a heat gun should work too.

Sometimes I sacrifice the part, hack it all up, then desolder pins one by one.

Solder suckers don't work well. They don't get all the solder out of a plated hole.

You might wick the pins and then wiggle the part a bit to break it loose.

Not sure how I could use a solder pot unless it is large enough to float the pcb on.

Temperature?

Looks like I'll cut the legs as tall as possible and heat one at a time to remove.

Yep, I've done that before.

Thanks all, I'll go at it later today. Mikek

+1, preferably use one sized to fit your job if you have sm parts close by

fill it right to the brim. This increases risk of course.

often easier to remove when there's plenty of solder still there

Maybe this will help? ......

I stuck my exacto blade under and edge of the switch and moved 1 pin, then another , back and forth until I had room to put the tip of my needle nose pliers in. Then the back, side bit by bit. I got the switches out way easier than I thought it would go. Then I added more solder, and used my solder sucker and the hole come out very clean. I was expecting much more trouble. Mikek

You probably should have used the solder sucker first. I find they do a good job of cleaning the holes, even with a pin still in them. Then the pins can be pulled out with much less effort, sometimes without any further use of the soldering iron.

Assuming it's lead free solder, the first thing is to wick off as much as you easily can then flood the joint with older 60:40 tin lead solder. Do this a few times to lower the melting point.

Then you might stand a chance with a solder sucker.

There are very low melting point solders around that are designed to help with component removal. Some of them are even lead free. They usually contain bismuth. Flooding a joint with such a solder makes it much easier to remove parts that have good heat sinking to large ground planes.

John

I stuck my exacto blade under and edge of the switch and moved 1 pin, then another , back and forth until I had room to put the tip of my needle nose pliers in. Then the back, side bit by bit. I got the switches out way easier than I thought it would go. Then I added more solder, and used my solder sucker and the hole come out very clean. I was expecting much more trouble. Mikek

if your holes are large enough you could try desoldering tubes.

they have a wall thickness of about 0.1mm so the leads need to be a bit smaller than the hole.

The price suggests the build quality fairly accurately, you could probably do better with a dispensing needle on a 10ml syringe body, if you can find one the right size - needle needs to fit over the pin and go through the hole.

I have some wide tips for my Metcal e.g. SMTC-161 (though sometimes a less wide one like SMTC-160 fits better). Those can melt all of the joints on one side of a DIP package or two pins on a switch, and then I can tilt it and get that side further from the board. Then I let it cool before releasing the force, and melt the other side and tilt it the other way, let it cool, and then go back and do the other side. By rocking it back and forth I can get it out without damaging anything.

A good solder sucker might also work.

If there are internal ground planes without thermal reliefs then all bets are off, and the big hot air gun is usually needed, sometimes in addition to the metcal.

OP here, I'm surprised this is getting so much attention. I felt a little silly even asking the question, about desoldering a switch. The switches I removed came out very easy. Not what I expected! I did crank up the temp on my soldering iron to 830* and just moved from pin to pin with a little prying force near each pin with an Exacto blade, until I got enough room to insert my needle nose pliers and then used those to pry with. After the switches were out I added solder and then heated the topside and sucked out the solder from the other side. The holes were very clean after that, didn't have to do any further solder removal. This was my Arduino and they are fairly inexpensive. Recently my son brought a pcb home from work that was some type of controller, it had a bad membrane switch in the middle of the board, surrounded by parts, not any room to get a good prying action, I didn't want to attempt removal on that board. It wasn't mine, it was expensive and would stop work until they got a new one, if they could. We just added wires and outboarded a new switch. There was plenty of room on the front panel for adding the outboarded switch. Mikek

Well, I'll be ... as they used to say. I've never heard of them, but they look like they could be very useful.

I dunno' ... the pictures and descriptions are exactly the same. But for a coupla' bux it's worth the chance that the more expensive ones are actually better.

Thanks for the tip.

OP Here is a picture of the pcb showing the holes where the 3 switches were removed.

Nice clean holes. Just like we all want. Mikek