What is Micro Soldering?

You may have brought your phone to a repair shop and they told you it needed "micro soldering" and you may be asking yourself what is micro-soldering anyway?

Micro Soldering Repairs

Micro Soldering Repairs

 

First lets start off with soldering; which involves connecting wires or components to each other with an alloy made from tin and copper. A metal alloy, with a melting point or melting range below 840°F (450°C), which is melted to join metallic surfaces. By joining two surfaces with this alloy is conducts electricity and allows current to flow from one component to another. 

 

A solder joint with a wire onto a PCB

A solder joint with a wire onto a PCB

 

Why would you need to join two components together? Typically the common uses of solder are when a wire or trace gets cut and needs to be "fused" back to into the circuit. Also when you are building a circuit, joining all the essential parts is needed. Many types of solder exist to allow for better applications such as leaded and unleaded solder. Leaded solder has the lowest melting temperature of 183 °C  (361 °F) of all the tin-lead alloys; the melting point is truly a point — not a range. Often times bismuth can be added to the solder to create even lower melting points. 

flux.jpg

During soldering you’ll need to use some flux. Flux is a thick liquid that allows the solder to flow easily into the connection you are trying to melt. Without flux you are melting two connections dry and it does not work well.

Amscope microscope

Amscope microscope

Often times with smaller mobile devices, a need for shrinking the surface mounted components arises. With the smaller components comes smaller tools. Typically working with components on the 0402 scale and even smaller makes using standard tools very difficult. The scale is literally microscopic; components on a board can be smaller than a grain of rice (hence the microscope)

SMC micro soldering on a pcb

SMC micro soldering on a pcb

 

When the components and IC's get to a smaller size, often times a smaller soldering tip is needed, with this tip you will also need to a microscope to facilitate the repair. While the term micro soldering is a bit broad, anything needed to be repaired and soldered under a microscope would be considered "micro soldering"

 

0402 size

 

If you are in need of micro soldering services for any mobile device, be sure to contact us today for your repair needs. We are based in Burlington, VT and do offer mail-in repair services.