I needed some bits and pieces for a microcontroller project I am working on, a video monitor socket and ps2 keyboard and mouse sockets. Since I live in a small sugar farming town and the nearest city - Cairns is more a tourist town and 60km away, and it was 10pm at night and I am impatient, I decided to raid an old motherboard for the sockets.

Of course I was only armed with a soldering iron, no solder sucker or that braid stuff, this wasn't gonna cut it...the answer, I used a small gas blowtorch, heated the whole solder tabs in one hit and voila!!!

The only trick is to use a fair amount of heat and get the part out quickly before the PCB gets all charcoal and smells really funky, and I'm sure the smoke would be pretty toxic, but I did this outside...

PCI slot anyone ?

Russell.

One of the professors at my university told me about this. It works really well on surface mount components too. You just heat the component and bang the edge of the board on a table. Chips, caps, and resistors go flying everywhere!

BTW, what kind of project are you doing?

Ha, does this make me a professor?... ok don't answer that, I know the answer.

The project is a quadrature encoder feedback and correction for steppers, basically a poor man's servo system, its a work in progress.

Russell.

Actually i saw the method you use over the internet some years back.
They recomend to remove the i.c. chips this way.

I have to wish you good luck on the salvaged components and before you use it make sure it is still in good condition as the heat might melt the plastic side of the sockets, the connection pins are normally okay (you have mention about the charcoal issue).