Hello.
I’m MapleEngineer. I’m from Eastern Ontario and I’ve been soldering for over 40 years as a hobbyist. My user name is MapleEngineer because I’m an artisan maple syrup maker and design and build my own machinery and industrial controllers.
I, like just about everyone, started out with a pencil iron and a bit of solder in a clear plastic tube.
If you’re into electronics and soldering please subscribe and feel free to contribute and ask questions.
Thanks for your interest. The most difficult reworks that I’ve done are the small, handheld gaming devices like the Atari Lynx and the NEC TurboExpress. They use SMD electrolytic capacitors and some of them are buried under silicone. I have to excavate them and desolder them without tweezers. I just bought a Hakko FM-203 DP which will take tweezers but I haven’t ordered them yet.
My largest build was the SixtyClone 250466 Commodore 64 motherboard clone.
Oh yeah, those potting/epoxy materials can be really annoying to remove. At work we have some prototypes that someone decided needed Silastic everywhere… so half of the debugging time is peeling that stuff away. At least that stuff in particular is easy to peel :)
In this case I believe that it was simply white silicone caulking. I’ve run into potting compounds and epoxies a number of times. There are apparently solvents for most potting compounds but I’ve never used them.