How to rework small surface mount LED

I talked about soldering small surface mount LED in my previous posts by using DIY reflow oven. Today I would like to show you how to rework similar LED, which is, to desolder this LED off the PCB and solder a new one on it.

It is quite different from populating a bare circuit board because the board comes with all types of other components. Rework process is more to fix a problem than to create new damage, so I will need to focus on the target LED only, not to affect other ICs. The LED is from Philips Luxeon Rebel series, about 3mm x 5mm in size. The pads for soldering are on the bottom of the component, making it impossible to solder with the traditional soldering iron

Heat gun is a great tool for this purpose as it is good at spot heating. With proper procedure and handling, the removed LED might still be reusable.

Stencil, unfortunately, couldn’t be used in this situation to assist the solder paste applying process. However, thanks to the surface tension, manually applying the paste onto the solder pads still work for this job. Don’t worry if they look messy at the beginning.

Check out my video for more details!