effective suction tool for occasional chip removal / placement?

[k8943]

Until now have made / reworked PCB entirely with tweezers.

But have a 64pin chip with rounded edges that's tricky to hold onto and am wondering if a vacuum tool would be useful?

There seem to be a bunch of very cheap vacuum suction "pens" out there: are any of them any good? Recommendations? Or....

[helius]

The spring-activated suction pens are not very good. They do not provide continuous suction, so parts fall off.
One type of tool with a small vacuum pump is called the "Bead Smith Pick-It-Up" and is fairly priced at around $35.
Hakko makes a self-contained vacuum pump tool called the 394, but it is rather bulky and awkward, and a higher price than the above.

Keep in mind that vacuum tools may not be ESD safe and should not be allowed to contact package pins. If your chip has a metal heat spreader you need to take special precautions.

[KL27x]

OP, just to be clear, the vacuum pickup tools are useful for placing the chips onto the fluxed/pasted boards. You can't hold chips in place or lift them while "reworking." The plastic nozzle that the steel needle slips over will melt while you're shooting at it with hot air.  The title of your post suggests you may not be looking for a pickup tool.


If you are: For a pasted board, you need pretty high precision, and those squeeze pens are not very effective. It takes a lot of force to push the button in to release the part, and the entire tool is feather light. But for picking up and dropping the chips with low precision, they can be useful. Say you dropped a tube of chips and have to get them back in order. Or maybe you are just plopping chips onto a fluxed board for hand soldering.

I have used the plastic pen. I have used a proper vacuum/desoldering station. I had the "bead smith" thing years back, and it works great.

I went cordless for the last 3-4 years with the Hakko 394. It works a treat, but it costs a shiny penny.

[k8943]

Thanks for additional points.

You guessed right that in my imagination had considered picking up a chip under hot air, squirting flux underneath and plopping it back down ;-)

Odd that there's not a single video on the web of someone using the Hakko 394...

[helius]

Vacuum chip removal is used for some situations, but KL27x is correct that it's a problem if hot air has heated the whole chip. This type of tool is commonly supplied with hot air stations: the idea is that you slide the tines under the chip and it will raise it up when the solder melts.

[helius]

I have acquired a Hakko 394: it's much smaller and more graceful than I previously thought. The weight of the entire tool is very similar to only the handpiece of a corded vacuum tool I have (ZT-3). The design is also very elegant, with a well-balanced DC motor and a precision diaphragm pump. It even has a tiny release valve using an unusual woven rubber buffer material.

My only complaint is that there it has less available suction compared to the corded tool. Nonetheless I was able to pick up TSOP-40 packages easily. I think it might struggle with some larger PQFPs.

[jmelson]

Until now have made / reworked PCB entirely with tweezers.

But have a 64pin chip with rounded edges that's tricky to hold onto and am wondering if a vacuum tool would be useful?

There seem to be a bunch of very cheap vacuum suction "pens" out there: are any of them any good? Recommendations? Or....

I have not found the "pens" to be worth a darn.  However, they may come with a set of suction cups with Luer-taper mounts on them.
Or, you can buy a set of the IC suction cups.  What I did was cut off the end on a tiny plastic syringe and shove it into a plastic hose.  Then, I can mount the desired suction cup to that, and suck on the other end of the tube to pick up the part.  This way, as long as I keep sucking, the part stays on the cup!  The "pen" things don't hold vacuum long enough, and then the part drops on the floor, bending the leads.

Jon

[ubbut]

There are handheld suction tools on aliexpress as well:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-shipping-NEW-MINI-handheld-Vacuum-Pump-Electric-Vacuum-Suction-pen-Air-Vacuum-Pump-for-SMD/1686385148.html?spm=2114.search0104.3.120.ba5f7fdfSLZcnK&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_1_10065_10068_10547_319_317_10548_10696_10084_453_10083_454_10618_10304_10307_10820_10821_537_10302_536_10843_10059_10884_10887_321_322_10103,searchweb201603_51,ppcSwitch_0&algo_expid=e8566e2e-334e-4148-875e-1e175e13cdcd-20&algo_pvid=e8566e2e-334e-4148-875e-1e175e13cdcd&transAbTest=ae803_4