Hi Ral-Clan,
It will save me from buying perf board and pin headers!
Yup, it'll make it a whole lot easier than using perf board and if you have a whole bunch of sockets in old gear, even better!
Ja, definitely use the heatgun to desolder the RAM chips. A hint with the desoldering pump, suck out as much solder as you can from each hole in the PCB, then use the heatgun to melt the small amounts of solder left in the PCB holes and then remove the IC socket/component. This'll make it a lot easier to remove the IC socket as well as prevent the IC socket legs from potentially breaking. It also prevents the through-hole plating and tracks from potentially being lifted or damaged. Just don't keep the heatgun on the board for too long otherwise it'll discolour and delaminate.
I've used this method lots of times, from removing the Agnus socket in my A500 to removing Zorro2/ISA edge connectors on my A2000 and it works very well.
For the RAM chips themselves, I first of all bent the legs straight where they bend underneath the chip. I then bent the outer legs to a near horizontal position. VERY important though, when you bend them to the near horizontal position, you also need to twist the leg by half a turn otherwise the leg will snap off where it meets the ceramic package. Hopefully you can see this in the second last picture of my post.
The inner legs can just be bent normally as they don't have to bend very far. You'll need to cut the inner legs a bit shorter so that the chip sits flat on the IC socket. The outer legs were just not long enough to reach that outer pins on the IC socket, so I soldered a short piece of wire-wrap wire to the leg of the RAM chip to reach the pin on the IC socket.
When you're ready to solder the RAM chip onto the IC socket, take a spare IC socket and solder it into a spare scrap PCB. Place the IC socket that you want to solder the RAM chip onto and place it into the IC socket that you've just soldered onto the scrap PCB. This'll stop the legs from moving when you solder the RAM chip onto the IC socket.
I suggest practicing a couple of times with bending the legs of the RAM chips and soldering them onto the IC socket with some scrap components before doing the real deal. It's VERY time consuming, so a lot of patience is required.
PS: My chips are SOJ like yours. I had been referring to them as SMD (Surface Mounted Device?) because because they were soldered straight to the SIMM board without through hole, but I guess my terminology was wrong. I thought ZIPs were SOJ because of the little bend in the legs - but I am all "straightened" out now!
Ha ha! Yup, it's easy to get caught up in in all the jargon, but I'm sure everyone knew what you meant.
Let us know how it goes, I'll help out whereever I can. :laugh1:
Cheers!
