i thought it would be just as good for clamping circuit boards down with the washers so that you could solder easier just tighten down the nut and the board hovers in front of your face while you work

I did exactly same tool with pin on place of screw a long time ago. I am using it to clamp of scope or logic analyzer probe to desired place on PCB. Pin sits on PCB signal way and probe is clamped to pin. Maybe my idea will be useful for somebody too.

smart but not original … i have something fairly similar to this i got as part of an SMD soldering kit bit it comes in from the top almost like a desklamp in construction

i can see this having slip problems because it has no grip and its on an angle

personally i find soldering the board first than using a vacuum tweezer to place the components wile melting the solder to be the best method

Why would you need a clamp to hold down an SMT component? This would take forever. You put solder on one pad, set the SMT component in place with tweezers, heat the pad with the pre-applied solder, remove the tweezers. Bam. If you are going to take the time to hold down each component with a clamp like this, I hope you’re either only soldering a few components, or you have a great deal of disposable time!

Next time on Hackaday: how to hack wind with paperweights.

And surely there should be an LED and an Arduino hot glued on there, somewhere.

Sigh. All the cowboys dismissing this as “useless” must not do very much soldering. After doing ~700 PCBs by hand I’ll acknowledge any trick to make things easier. The setup shown in TFA makes sense because they are soldering a small component to really big pads…hard to keep things from moving around due to surface tension. Probably as easy to use a set of fine tipped tweezers if you add a little solder ahead of time.

But the clamp method is most useful for IC rework. Fine pitch ICs are easy to solder on new PCB, especially if you have a paste stencil, but if you previously removed the IC it can be tough to balance it on top of all the little solder humps. Removing excess solder is a nice thing to do, but you never get all of it and solder wick sometimes lifts pads. With a clamp, you position the IC at your leisure and then hit it with the iron or hot air, and the constant pressure helps sink all the pins down to the PCB.

It’s also really handy for large SMD components, like capacitors and inductors, that require a lot of heat to get soldered and are impossible to hold with fingers without burning yourself.

@macegr
I disagree with pretty much everything you said. Like BiOzZ, I am constantly soldering SMD, and I can tell you that I regularly (and repeatedly!) remove very fine pitch IC’s from boards and have never lifted a pad. It sounds like you are using way too much pressure or heat, or are going the wrong direction with the wick. If you must slide the wick on the pads, slide it in the direction of the trace, towards the dead end. Works great. I can replace a 48TSSOP maybe a minute, including solder removal.

Careful relying on this to act as a heat sink – the small point touching the plastic case will sink a negligible amount of energy compared to what you’re putting in with the iron.

Ekaj: I do a lot of rework on TSSOP and QFN, and while it’s extremely rare that I lift a pad, it only needs to happen once to ruin your day, on a PCB that otherwise has $80 worth of good components. I can solder 0603 freehand all day with no magnifier but it’s dumb not to use simple tricks if they work. It’s not a freaking set of training wheels.

As a Marylander, I applaud the idea, but he destroyed a crab mallet in the process…..WAH!

macegr, if you lift pads with wick, that means you don’t know how to use it. The important thing while wicking is to always keep the wick hot and fluxed. If you don’t have flux, solder will have a hard time sticking, if it’s not hot enough, solder won’t melt. And the worst thing ever to do while wicking is to place it onto the pad, heating it with the iron, removing the iron and then pulling on the semi-solidified solder. You will lose some pads along the way.

this might be helpful for beginners, but you can easily work without it.

when some extra help is needed e.g. to tack the first pad or two, a blunted toothpick and an iron with a tiny bit of extra tinning is much, much faster.

geez people, its a tool. you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to. the fact that *you* don’t find it handy doesn’t invalidate it. get over yourselves already.