OK a little update, with a "How I do it" - not necessarily the best way, but it works for me and my current tools.
Now, to remove the molex pins, remember the #1 priority is the board and the tracks, so you need to minimise the stress on the pcb. Without fancy desoldering gear, this is what I do...
With (not your best pair, this is hard on them) side cutters, cut the plastic strip base into small pieces, while they are still on the PCB. The you can easily slide the pieces up off the pins: (pic shows me 1/2 way through one). For IC sockets, you need to figure out how to remove the plastic frame and leave the pins behind. This board had 4 different types of sockets, and each one needed a different way to fiddle about to pop it off. For ICs on the PCB, just cut the legs off the body then desolder. Much easier as well as less stressful on the PCB.
Then you can use tweezers (pliers are ok but suck the heat away from the iron) grab each pin and heat the joint from the top side and slide them out, one at a time. To make this much easier, I use a paste flux I bought a small tub of from deal extreme. less than $5 and will last for years.
Once you have all the pins out, it may look like this:
The next step is to clean the pads. If they are bare copper that is tarnished like these, a fine grit sandpaper, or extremely careful scaping with a hobby blade back to shiny copper is needed. Next is to tin and flood the pads with fresh new solder:
Be quick and gentle with the heat. If the solder won't flow, then stop and re-clean the pads. More heat will not fix it, it will peel up the tracks.
Finally, you remove the excess solder with a sucker-pen. I prefer the pen over braid as you need a lot of heat to use braid. Check the back side and repeat...
In that picture you can see the left over flux on the PCB. That's ok, once we have removed all the crappy sockets, pins and components a good scrub with isopropyl and a nylon brush will have it clean and ready to re-populate.
Here are some areas that cleaned up well:
Here are some that are going to need work before components go back:
Those bad areas are in the main corrosion zone, and have had previous heavy handed work done on them...
Coming up next: Cleaning the PCB, and starting track repairs. Oh, and find out why I had to buy nail polish
Cheers
Jacob
