Howto: DIL IC leg repair

So…  You’ve got an IC that you’ve been working on, and you’ve managed to snap a leg off.  At this point, you can:

Broken DIL - oh noes!

  • Fly into a rage because you’ve just broken something that is nearly impossible to replace
  • Search google and get frustrated at the futility of the search
  • Have a beer.  Or two.
  • Wonder how to repair the thing, after all the DIL package is only there to make it easy for us humans to handle the thing

I went from stage 1 through 4 within about 10 minutes, and found a useful article on electronicspost, which offered a little hope that there might be enough metal to solder onto.

There wasn’t.

DIL/Dremel interface

So it was out with the Dremel to see if I could gently coax some more metal into being visible.  Not the world’s greatest job, but a result nonetheless.

From here, I managed to solder a leg on.  I then used a spare 16 pin DIL socket to mount the chip into semi-permanently so that stress on that replacement leg could be avoided.

Best of all? The chip works perfectly! Which is what is known in the trade as a result.

Repaired DIL

If I can do this, anyone can.

Nick

Family man, international businessman and geek at heart.

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