Soldering

Oh yes, that helps a lot! Thanks :thumbsup:

Yakumo

 

What I use, and what is used by most modders in Spain is:

JBC 14S soldering iron. 14W, default tip is 2mm, I got a 1mm tip for SMD and more precise soldering, they cost around 30€ (5k yen), and well, they are quite good overall. I supose that there are 100V versions avaible.

0,5mm rosin core solder, 60% Sn 40% Pb, it's manufacturated in France and is not RoHS, it works good. Way better than some chinese shitty solder I've seen.

Common solder sucker, this one costs around 300 yen and are as alredy said useful, very useful, but you've gotta be quite cautious with them, once I sucked a SMD resistor... XD

A stand with sponge and, this is very, very important, it must have something for FIXING it into the stand, most stands are just a metal spring for heat dispersion, and you just put the iron there, imagine that you move or something and you trip with the iron cord, it will fall and you could get injuried. One which has a clip will help. For added weight and ensuring that it won't fall, find one which has a large base and put on it a broken HDD, a rock or whatever.

Get a power strip and put it on your work table. It might sound retarded, but most stand alone soldering irons have a really short cord. Once I was messing around with the cord because it was too much short and I burnt my face with the iron tip.

And of course, the most important thing when soldering is caring about selfsafety. Go with care, don't be incredibly cautious but be concentrated, remember, you have a 250º stick on your hands.

 

Also try to avoid inhaling the smoke while soldering as it's not that good for the health. ;-)

 

One of the first projects I did was a sync separator (using the LM1881 in DIP packaging). Being that it was DIP (pins go thru the PCB and are soldered on the other side of the board), it's the easiest to start learning soldering/desoldering with. If you can solder a DIP chip, you can solder pins in the Xbox LPC area for modding.


For smaller things, get a dead Xbox 1 board and work on soldering and desoldering from the vias (such as the D0 via). This will help with working with smaller spots to solder to (such as the TSOP flash chip on most versions of the Xbox 1 board.

Most importantly, patience is your friend.