SEQURE HT140 Hot Tweezers

To lift a 0603 resistor with a soldering iron you have to heat one end, then the other, and catch the moment when both are molten at once. Hot tweezers heat both terminals together: squeeze, wait two seconds, lift the part off.

This is the tool for any board rework that involves taking small things off: resistors, capacitors, diodes, LEDs, small transistors — anything with two or three legs.

The HT140 does a second job as well: with C210 tips it works as an ordinary fine soldering iron. That is the “2-in-1” — what changes is the cartridge, not the instrument. The cartridges — C120 tweezer pairs and C210 iron tips — live either in the container with the tool or in the big consumables box.

Power

It runs from USB-C PD, from QC, or from an ordinary supply with a barrel jack, 5 to 28 V. How fast it heats depends on that, and it depends a lot: from a 65 W source it reaches 500 °C in five seconds, from a 140 W one in three.

Here it runs off one of the shared 65 W USB-C PD bricks: those are plugged into sockets around the hackspace and kept in the common box of power supplies. With one of those, 500 °C takes those five seconds.

The screen always shows how many volts it got. If the heating feels sluggish, look at that number first.

What it is good for

• Lifting a two-terminal SMD part without cooking its neighbours
• Moving a part: take it off, clean the pads, put it back
• Removing things that are glued as well as soldered — tweezers are better at pulling
• Soldering fine joints with a C210 tip, when tweezers are not what you need
• Working under a microscope: at 50 g it does not drag your hand down

How to use

1. Plug the power in and let it come up to temperature.
2. Set the temperature. For lifting small SMD parts 300–330 °C is usually enough; massive parts and lead-free solder want more.
3. Close the jaws on the part's terminals and let the solder melt on both sides — that is seconds, not fractions of a second.
4. Lift the part straight up, without scraping the neighbouring pads.
5. Put the instrument in its stand. The jaws stay hot longer than you think.

What not to do

• Do not lever against solder that has not melted: you will tear a pad off the board before the part comes free. If it does not move, it is not molten yet.
• Do not use tweezers on multi-leg packages. For QFP and BGA there is the IR6500 rework station; tweezers would simply rip the legs off.
• Do not change the cartridge while it is hot.
• Do not put it down on the bench until it has cooled.

Renting it

This one goes home with you: it is light and runs off any PD charger. The power supply is not part of the rental — our USB-C PD bricks are shared, so bring your own, and the more powerful it is the faster it heats. The daily rate and the term are in the rental block on this page.

Access

The tweezers are at the soldering bench in the hackspace room, so a plan that includes hackspace access is required. No induction is needed.