Electronic – the type of solder used in a playstation 3 (PS3)? And its melting temperature

reworksoldering

I have a hot air station and I'm trying to replace the HDMI port on a PS3 (playstation 3). The problem I'm having is trying to melt the solder on the hdmi port. I'm curious to what kind of solder its using as I can't seem to melt it at even 400C. I did test to see if it melted my other solder I got from radio shack and it did in fact melt it.

  • Why is the solder on these boards so much harder to melt? Is there something extra added to these solder points?

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Best Answer

Lead-free solder, most likely. I would expect melting temperature somewhere between 210°C and 230°C. As @Ignacio and @Majenko have mentioned in the comment, the ground planes in the PCB are acting as heat sinks. A common way to address this is to pre-heat the whole board. Of course, you have to be careful and avoid pre-heating so much that other components (BGAs, most notably) come off. See this article for some details.

Here's another useful trick. Leaded solder has a lower melting point around 190°C. You can lower the melting point of the lead-free solder joint by mixing leaded solder to it in situ.

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