Solder Reflow
Oops, missed March. Nothing much happened: birthday, ridiculously busy lifestyle, etc. Anyhow...

Lead-free solder sucks. I've been complaining about it for years. On the balance of things, considering how disposable electronics are these days, it is probably a good thing. But its characteristics are terrible when you have to re-work a part. It's also brittle and fragile, which is obviously not a great thing with all of the mobile devices we have today.

In fairness, I never thought that its brittle attributes would actually prevent a piece of solid-state technology from working during its lifespan. However, I now know better.

My iPhone is anything but new, but it is still on its first battery and does everything I need it to do. At some point in the last few weeks, the wireless started getting unreliable. Disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling to ensure good contacts did not help. Searching the net for something as broad reaching as non-working Wi-Fi on an iPhone brought dozens of workarounds, many of which probably only worked by chance.

I was quite surprised when I came upon a site that encourages people to reflow their solder in a household oven. The goal is to melt the solder joint at each component and having it re-solidify, thereby making any fractures and imperfections go away.

So, here I was this morning taking the PCB back out of the phone, preheating the oven to 385°F, building up little aluminum foil stands to go on a cooking sheet. In went the boards for seven minutes. I left it in for eight just for good measure. Long story short, it worked.