How to pull out gold pins ?

I'm just wondering how you guys pull out gold plates pins from motherboards or cards. It takes me a lot of time to pull them out. I probably do not have the good technique. It would be great if someone could post a quick tutorial. :wink:
Thanks !

Well, I just heat the boards over a bucket with a quality heat gun, and then bang them on the bucket edge. All of the soldered item fall into the bucket, including the pins. This way, the entire pin comes out of the board. You can also clip them, but you'll be leaving a small portion of pin behind in the silicon.

Be sure to get a QUALITY heat gun, like a Milwaukee, or they will not last. I went through 3 cheapies before finally shelling out the money for a good one. Now I'm happy

Fever

You mean, you desolder them ?
I should try that...

Yup- Works well for me. Just be sure to do this outside. The fumes given off by the resins in the silicon are nasty. It doesn't take too much heat. Just enough to melt the solder. The boards will burn if you leave the heat on them too long, and it's not necessary.

Fever

Great thanks !

I've been using the same technique described by fever until recently. I've started testing a mixture of Cupric Chloride crystals, water, and peroxide. It takes a little time but it works wonderfully. I have loads of the crystals as by products to my HCl-H2O2 batches. Just dehydrate the liquid after getting the gold out and these long emerald green crystals form These babies will eat any type of base metal for lunch. They need a little time to work but due one hell of a job. They will even remove gold plate.

Here's a pic of my 'crystal garden':



The entire plastic cake carrying pan is a solid layer of these crystals with a thin layer of saturated solution on top. The whole mix has a bit of gold flakes floating in it that I need to filter out.

I'll show the forum how they work when I get around to the Peroxide method tutorial.

Steve