Microsoldering vs through-hole: which your repair needs

Not every repair needs the same equipment. A blown capacitor on a guitar amp and a dead charging IC on an iPhone are both "soldering jobs", but the tools, time, and skill needed to fix them sit in completely different leagues. One can be done at the kitchen table with a £15 iron from Maplin's ghost. The other needs a stereo microscope, hot air, a preheater, and a few thousand pounds of bench kit before you've even unscrewed the case.

The difference is real, and worth understanding before you contact a repair shop. It's the gap between a £40 turnaround and a £150+ board-level job. It also determines whether your local TV repair chap can help, or whether the board needs to go to someone with the right gear. Here's how the three categories actually break down, and how to roughly self-qualify your own job before you send it in.

Through-hole soldering — what's covered

Through-hole is the old way: components have wire leads that go through drilled holes in the board, get bent over on the underside, and are soldered to a pad. You'll see this on old PCBs, kit electronics, audio gear, power supplies (large electrolytic capacitors, transformers, big inductors), vintage hi-fi, and a lot of industrial control boards still in service today.

It's doable with a regular iron, regular leaded or lead-free solder, and normal hand tools. The joints are mechanically tough — you can tug on a wire without the pad lifting, which is part of why this method survived for decades in anything that vibrates or gets handled. A competent hobbyist can do it; a workshop can do it faster and tidier.

Common through-hole jobs we see: capacitor replacements on PSUs (the bulgy-top failure mode), audio jack swaps on amplifiers, connector replacements on test equipment, full recaps on vintage receivers, and replacing failed transformers or relays on industrial boards.

SMD soldering — the middle ground

SMD stands for Surface-Mount Device. Components sit on top of the board on flat pads — no holes, no leads poking through. This is most modern electronics from roughly the mid-90s onwards: 0603 and 0805 resistors and capacitors (about 1.5mm and 2mm long respectively), SOIC and TSSOP ICs with visible legs, larger MOSFETs in DPAK or TO-263 packages.

Still doable with a fine iron tip and steady hands. Tweezers and proper flux paste help a lot — flux is doing most of the work on SMD, the iron is just delivering heat. You can see what you're doing without a microscope, though a cheap magnifying lamp makes it noticeably easier.

Common SMD jobs: capacitor swaps on modern motherboards, straightforward IC swaps on consumer electronics, replacing burned-out resistors after a power surge, swapping voltage regulators on amplifier preamp boards.

Microsoldering — when the microscope comes out

Microsoldering is the deep end. We're talking components 0402 or smaller — that's about 1mm by 0.5mm, smaller than a grain of rice. BGA (Ball Grid Array) chips that hide all their connections underneath the package. QFN packages with no leads at all, just pads on the bottom edge. 0.4mm-pitch FPC connectors where the contacts are physically too close together to see with the naked eye.

The equipment list is non-trivial: stereo microscope at 10x to 40x, hot-air rework station with proper airflow control, fine-tip iron with 0.3mm or smaller tip, board preheater for anything bigger than a phone PCB, dedicated SMD tweezers, and actual proper flux — not the stuff that comes in solder paste tubes.

Common microsoldering jobs: HDMI port replacement on consoles, USB-C port replacement on phones and laptops, charging IC swaps, audio IC replacement, board-level repairs on PS5, Xbox, and Switch where the fault is a single tiny component out of a few thousand on the board.

How to tell which yours is

Look at the broken thing, honestly.

If you can see what's broken with your eyes alone and the components look comfortably "big" — round capacitors, visible wires, parts you could pick up with normal tweezers — you're in through-hole or easy-SMD territory. Most repairs land here.

If you can see what's broken but the components look like grains of sand on the board, or you need a magnifier just to read the markings on the chip, you're in harder SMD territory. Still affordable, still recoverable, just needs better gear.

If you can't see the failure point at all even with a magnifier — no visible burn mark, no bulging cap, no obvious bad component — you're almost certainly in microsoldering territory. The fault is somewhere on the board, but identifying it requires a microscope, a schematic if you can get one, and a multimeter on the actual rails. That's where cost goes up.

Where the cost actually goes

Our £40 minimum at the workshop covers diagnosis time plus minor through-hole or SMD work. Most through-hole and simple SMD jobs land between £40 and £80 all-in, including parts where the part is cheap.

Microsoldering work runs £80 to £200 typically, with BGA reflow or reball jobs sitting at the top of that range. That's not because the work takes longer — a microsolder job can be quicker than a through-hole recap once you're set up — it's because the equipment to do it costs several thousand pounds. The microscope, the hot air station, the preheater, the consumables, the years of practice not destroying boards. That's what you're paying for, not the twenty minutes of iron time.

What we offer

Full stack here: through-hole, SMD, microsoldering, BGA reflow and reball. One person, one bench, one set of standards across all of it.

Free pre-flight check on any job — send it in, we look at it under whatever magnification it needs, and we tell you what category of work it is and roughly what it costs before you commit. No surprise bills. If your job turns out to be a £40 through-hole fix when you were braced for £150, you find out before you've agreed to anything. Details at /soldering-repair.html.

If you've got something with a fault and you're not sure which league it's in, that's fine — that's what the pre-flight check is for. Send it in and find out.

See also

• BGA reflow vs reball — and when each matters
• Lifted pad rescue with kynar wire
• Lead-free vs leaded solder: which to use at home