Just saw this thread, was wondering how it went?
Lead free solder, in my experience is garbage! Also, it suffers more from being reflowed multiple times, I would suggest finding a good non-corrosive flux to squirt under the BGA before the next tiem you have to reflow the chip, atleast to clean up the solder joinst some, and then just rinse with high percentage Iso-alcohol. And re doing the thermal compound can be helpful too.
Coragin, What equipment did you use to remove and re-attach the BGA?! Iv'e always wanted to be able to do re-balling at home, mostly for experiments, but have never taken the dive into that hobby.
Reballing for fun or exercise is costly. Off the top of my head...
Reball mainboard heater - $100
Reball hot air workstation - $200 (ish)
Reball templates - $50 (got the templates for 360/ps3 cpu/cpu)
Reball template and chip holder station - $50
Plus you need various other things that vary in price depending on where you get them and quality...
Board Temp Guage - $35
Flux Paste
Leaded Solder Balls
Various Sized brushes (I use horse hair paint brushes - for fluxing chips/board)
Solder gun
Heat Gun (in case the Reball dont melt all solder balls)
Obviously Thermal Paste, I use normal ceramic TP as the reball works perfect you dont need arctic silver.
I also have various lights and magnifying glasses as well as a led head lamp.
I must stress that getting into this for experiments is not recommended just from the price tag. Since I stopped doing this, all the equipment just sits there. I stopped due to ebay giving me a perma ban for selling jtags. Now any account I make that even tries to sell anything no matter what it is gets the ban hammer. It dont matter what account info I use as they track all info related to you, address, phone numbers, ip addresses...which would not be so bad except you NEED paypal. So they even track the info you have with paypal, which includes bank account, SSN, address, phone number, everything...
There is no way to get back to selling when paypal gives ebay all of your information including SSN. They say that they dont, but there is no other way to track other than SSN.
I used a business account, with a different address, in the business name not my own, different phone number, VM windows account, new email address connected to a .com I made myself in the business name. The only thing that linked me to all this new info was a SSN that paypal made me provide. Even my IP address had changed. So I figured out all that after much trial and error. I dont know what crime could be attached to paypal sharing your SSN with ebay, but I know for a fact that is why paypal requires a SSN for you to collect payments from ebay (and ebay only).
I could have sold through a website, but business crashed to a halt, so I just dropped it all. Still pisses me off as I am still getting emails from ebay saying my account is suspended and to get it back just pay them $200 in selling fees, which is a bunch of crap because my Fathers account got suspended with mine, he paid his fees and they just collected the cash and kept him suspended citing "His account is associated with mine due to the same address". So I refuse to pay them a red cent. I even called them and still do from time to time to bitch them out, then I say that I am recording our conversation and they promptly hang up.
Guess it is okay for them to record you, but if you record them they will hang up on you. Try it lol call ebay and when they answer before you say anything about account info or even your name, tell them you are recording the call. If they dont hang up they will tell you that you have to stop or they will end the call. It is quite funny.
