I do appreciate the info. I did end up buying a hot air solder iron and I want to have a crack at it in the future. I did look later on if I had a wider tip, and I didn't, but that would've worked too I imagine. But luckily, doing what we did with the through hole, everything electrically worked out and we saved another unit from being trashed.

@@FencerFixerRepairLLCKansasCity For sure. I have substituted SMD parts for thru-hole and vice versa multipe times without any problems. I wish I could find more transformers for fencers in general, that is the most difficult part for me to find. Many people in my area won't leave the dead unit with me to even have a chance to revese engineer them to make my own for future repairs.

I don't have a flat labor rate on repairs. The average range of labor for us is $15-$30 then whatever parts cost is and we also pack and ship things back to customers, so we have that as par is the quote as well. Some of these units aren't super expensive brand new, $150 +/-, so sometimes to help the customer out, we'll charge less on labor to help offset the cost. We always give the customer a free quote, even if we spend 30-45 minutes going through it. Most times we have to do the job between 70-100% completed to know if we've done the repair right. Or if we start looking into a unit and it looks like crap inside and needs a lot of work done, I'll stop and start writing things up. Then I'll call the customer and let them know the price with labor and shipping and a recommendation to fix or not to fix and see what they want to do.

The brands that use surface mount the most is Gallagher, Speedrite, Patriot, and Parmak's current 6/12v solar and non solar units. If a company uses surface mount, it's a lot quicker it seems for a robot to build the boards vs through hole and using wave soldering. Gallagher uses some sort of technique where it looks like the robot is chicken pecking the components onto the board. They can fit more components into a smaller package on a circuit board and then also make the overall size of the unit smaller in size. The bad thing about surface mount I think, is when the circuit board is damaged, a majority of the time the board is just replaced, but older style units with through hole stuff, you can typically fix the boards vs replacing the board.

@@FencerFixerRepairLLCKansasCity Guys are doing the same thing at home now. They call those "pick and place" machines. They use a solder paste that gently adheres the components to the board. It's a flux and solder suspension. You can use one of the little hot plates to heat the whole board and flow all of the components at once. I'm just amazed at what people can do today. Heck, I can design a circuit board myself and in a day or two, have it delivered to my door ready to populate. Amazing!

I was never trained up in Surface Mounted electronics and removal. When I went to school for electronics 20+ years ago now, through hole wasn't being taught and everywhere I've ever worked, they never did any of the surface mount removal. Luckily I was able to just electrically removed them from the circuit and put old school through hole ones in its place, and the unit went back to working beautifully.

@@FencerFixerRepairLLCKansasCity I understand completely. I went to BE&E in 1987. That was forever ago.

@@FencerFixerRepairLLCKansasCity I should have clarified. Basic Electricity and Electronics in the Navy. Then ET "A" school in Great Mistakes.

I don't think that iron will even think about touching that component without using something like low melt solder. Without even a basic hot air station, you're not going to budge that component. There may be a higher quality (hakko) that would have the nads to heat that hot, but that large pad on the back is going to fight you all the way.

@@TechGorilla1987 he still needs a soldering iron upgrade. I saw a previous video where he said it's cranked up to 800+ and he was having some issues getting it to heat up some small pads.

@@aurthorthing7403 Those pads had a conformal coating film on them and that usually fights me more than anything. We use Hakko tips on a different brand iron and typically most things come off fairly easy. I did buy today a hot air desoldering station and some different types of tweezers and grabbers. Even if I had gotten the bad SCR's off the board correctly, I didn't have any on hand and likely would've just put the through hole ones on in their place anyways.

@@FencerFixerRepairLLCKansasCity Oh, your method for replacing them with through-hole was fine. I was trying to restore a Ryobi battery tonight and it looks like it has an SCR like you replaced that it through-hole, but still soldered to the board like the one you tried to remove. The center pin was cut as the unit was soldered to a huge pad, but the outside two pins are clipped and bent to solder on a surface-mount pad.

@@aurthorthing7403 You're probably not wrong. Soldering irons lose heat like florescent lighting used to lose lumens from ballast degradation. You never noticed the decline in light till you replaced ballasts and bulbs together. I think the heater on my iron is also weak.

I did end up buying a hot air tool online, but I'll definitely play around with it on a junk board to get a sense of how to use it. Maybe I'll make a video of me trying it out and get some feedback on techniques and such. I don't deal a lot of surface mount stuff. Back when I was going through schooling and training on electronics, 20+ years ago now, they weren't teaching and training in that. The different places I've worked on for twists didn't even get into repairing surface mounted stuff on boards, but we'd do through hole stuff all the time. They just scraped the boards off good spare parts and would install a new board of it was too far gone in their eyes

​@@FencerFixerRepairLLCKansasCity Yep in the past I would often avoid working on surface mount, although I've found that with the right tools it's actually often easier than through-hole, except for the incredibly small stuff like 0201, I've started using nearly 100% SMD in most of my projects, it just works out better with more component availability and cheaper PCBs.