Desoldering Line-in jack on soundcard

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Jeff's right, solder wick (soderwik?) will do it just fine. Wick on the solder, iron on the wick, very slight wiggle just as the solder melts, and Presto! Either the solder is all wicked up, or the PCB land is lifted and twisted and things get just a little bit more difficult. Been there, done that, 97 3/4 % success rate. Old Chief Lynn

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Try an electrical paint stripper (those that look like hair dryers). Heat all the tabs at once and then use pliers to get it off the board.

--DF

In addition to solder wick, try replacing the solder that's on there with some 63/37. (Then remove that, of course.) The stuff that's on there is often a higher-temperature alloy, and it's been defluxed; both make it harder to remove.

Try lubricating the plunger of the desolder tool with grease or oil - it increases its efficiency 100% most times

Will give it a try, many thanks to you and others replies.

Suggestion: old, defunct soundcards are a dime a dozen from various sources.

Practice on one of those until you get it right; or you risk trashing your card beyond repair. Once you've successfully removed a jack, reinstall it on the dead card for practice (successful desoldering is only half the battle).

Now that you've got all that down, remove the jack from your 'good' card and *throw it away*! It's not worth trying to fix.

Replace it with one from your 'practice' card....

jak

I can vouch for that. I was in a situation where we regularly replaced DIPs in plated-thru holes. I got so good with solder wick that the chip would literally fall out of the board.

But, if you learn to use the solder sucker properly first, it cuts down on your wick consumption, but it is a PITA keeping it clean. :-)

Good Luck! Rich

Keep in mind that you might have a low-powered iron whose heat is being sucked up by a ground plane on the card. Therefore your solder will not melt well, if at all. That might explain why it worked on the signal pins (?), but not so well on the ground and mechanical pins (?).

If you try this I recommend using something like small pieces of sheet metal to make a shield around the part you want to remove. It's hard to direct the heat from those guns, and you could end up with a lot of nearby parts overheated and SMT parts might just start dropping off the board.

Just make sure that whatever you lube the plunger with is compatible with rubber. I got something into a solder sucker once and the o-ring plunger seal absorbed it and grew and jammed up the solder sucker. When I finally got it pulled apart, I found that the o-ring looked perfectly normal, but was now about