The issue is that one of the cap legs is soldered to a ground plane,
which is huge and often used as a heat sink for other nearby
components (including the cap itself).

You need to get a large tip for your iron, preferably hot.  It'll take
awhile to warm it up, since you're heating the entire local ground
plane.  If your tip is in poor condition add some solder to the joint
- it'll melt and help conduct heat into the joint.

Unless you have a very good solder sucker, you'll find that you can't
easily clean out the hole as well.  I either heat just the lead of the
cap (not the whole joint) during the removal stage and wiggle it as it
cools without removing it from the hole.  That leaves a tiny hole
through the solder.  If that doesn't work and the hole seals back up
when I do pull the lead out then I heat the joint as I'm inserting the
lead.  My soldering iron at home is an old weller magnetic tip, so it
takes some time for me to do the rework.  I believe I use a 700F or
800F 3mm wedge tip.

Needlenose pliers are needed both for removal and insertion - not only
do the caps get hot on removal, they occasionally fall apart.

Good luck.

-Adam

On 1/10/06, Randy Glenn <randy.glenn@gmail.com> wrote:
> The most recent issue with capacitors is not bad electrolyte, IIRC,
> but that Nichion was overfilling their caps.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
>
> Speaking of bad caps... anyone know a Fast And Easy Way to remove
> capacitors from a motherboard? I've got a perfectly good AMD
> motherboard here with lovely 3rd rate capacitors that are in various
> stages of failure, and would replace them if not for the fact that I
> can't seem to melt the solder on the leads.
>
> On 1/8/06, michael brown <spam-me@houston.rr.com> wrote:
> > From: "Mike Harrison"
> >
> >
> > >
> > > >I don't know what Dell is up to but their quality control and over
> > all
> > > >quality does seem to be slipping.
> > >
> > > ..but if you think they're bad, take a look at the dangerous junk
> > knocked out by the competition...
> > > I just took a look inside a fake Dell laptop PSU :
> > > http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/acadapter.html
> > > Warning : contains scenes some engineers may find disturbing.
> >
> > Nice, an obvious fire hazard.  This brings up something I wanted to
> > mention at the beginning of the thread.  From what I've heard, most of
> > the failing Dell power supplies is due to the second round of bad
> > capacitors to flood the world markets.  Apparently someone is still
> > using the bad/stolen formula since bulging/exploding caps are becoming
> > popular again.  I have seen several motherboard failures within the last
> > year (boards < 2 years old) due to burst/leaking caps.  These were
> > quality, name-brand boards.  Well, excepting the Epox board anyway.  ;-)
> >
> > --
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> > View/change your membership options at
> > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist
> >
>
>
> --
> -Randy Glenn
> Computer Eng. and Mgt. Year IV, McMaster University
> Industry Liason, McMaster IEEE Student Branch
>
> randy.glenn-at-gmail.com - glennrb-at-mcmaster.ca
> randy.glenn-at-computer.org - randy_glenn-at-ieee.org
> http://www.randyglenn.ca
>
> --
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> View/change your membership options at
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist
>

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