How To Desolder Components
Locating the Component’s Terminals
Contents
The next step is to take a good look at the component you want to remove and locate its terminals. As we mentioned, a printed circuit board has two visible sides, the component side, where the components are located, and the solder side, where the components are soldered. So, we should locate the component on the component side and find its terminals on the solder side.
We will use as an example an electrolytic capacitor from a motherboard; we show it in Figure 3. So, we will need to locate its terminals on the solder side of the motherboard.
Figure 3: Electrolytic capacitor that we will remove from the motherboard in our example.
Figure 4: Locating the capacitor terminals.
Figure 5: Capacitor terminals.