Daekar said:
ckthorp: Concerning the W60P3, for both soldering and possibly desoldering LEDs from a chip without hurting them (if possible) what kind of tip would you recommend? 600, 700, or 800 degrees?
Sorry for the delay. I recommend either a 600 or a 700. 650 is recommended for no-clean, 700 for rosin flux. 600 will work just fine, as will 700. The difference is pretty minor. It also partially depends on how well heatsunk the LED pads are. Higher temps will help desolder more heatsunk pads quicker. The thing that kills semiconductors (LEDs included) is heat*duration. Low heat for long durations and high heat for short durations are both bad. If you're desoldering to do a seoul upgrade, or some such, you don't really care about the part your removing so much. If I were to do an LED replacement, I'd do the following:
Solderwick all of the old LED's connections.
Heat (with the soldering iron) and bend the leads of the old LED one at a time to remove them.
Remove the old LED.
Clean the slug mounting point and resolderwick the pads
Place thermal compound, thermal epoxy, etc and stick the LED down.
Solder the leads quickly using silver bearing no-clean flux solder.
Curse because I put the LED in backwards
Repeat all steps but with the LED in correctly.
This might be helpful:
http://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/telescope/soldering.htm
This is a bit dated, but it shows lots of examples of good and bad solder joints:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~phylabs/bsc/PDFFiles/Soldered.pdf