Soldering (The lost art)

[lebouche]

Hi,
as discussed in the thread 'Tin smoke'.
Please can people like Eagen give us some tips on how to correctly do it... I'm always having a go and have fixed a few pairs of cans and my mixing desk, BUT, I dont have a clue what I'm doing or how it really should be done.
E.G it there a trick to not having three hands because i often feel like a contortionist
:Razz:

This is so geeky I love it!!!
First you take the solder...then you take the iron....mmmnnnnnnn and then the sucky thing....and you wet your sponge.
Make sure the iron is 156 degrees exactly and use only joe sold her solder...

[gbacklin]

Being an Ham Radio OM, that can pop out CW at a good clip, kit building has always been a good time.

With that in mind, here are some good links.

Soldering (http://www.ac6v.com/techref.htm#SOLD)

Take Care,
Gene

[jfee]

Tip: Don't use lead free solder.

[eagan]

Soldering is something that is definitely not awfully difficult, and it's not complex, but while fairly simple, it takes more than a second and a few words.

Actually, the "few words" thing is the main problem.

A quick story.

Once I was having some work done on my car by a top notch, excellent, very experienced auto mechanic I knew via the local SCCA. I have a certain amount of knowledge and skill in auto mechanics, but I have my limits where I would rather get somebody with serious chops on something. This was a case of that.

Specifically, I had a scary occurence that turned out to be a valve train problem on a SOHC engine where a bolt worked loose for some reason I never figured out (probably somebody's sloppy work before I bought the car). I opened up the top of the motor and found what the problem was (oh yeah, it was in a heavy snowstorm in a parking lot and I was freezing my ass off, too). I pulled out the tools, snugged down the escaping bolt, closed up the patient and fired it up, relieved that the thing was good again and in fact the beast had not blown up.

[I had been heading home when the engine started running really rough, then sounded like it was on maybe two cylinders (of four), and a whole lot of rattling started happening. I freaked, got off the road ASAP, opened the hood, and there was oil everywhere. It was getting dark, I couldn't tell WTF was happening, I thought it was blown up. Then I noticed the valve cover was loose, the explanation for the oil all over, and got curious and finally found the problem as daylight was running out completely.]

I took the car to this mechanic the next day. The reason was this. That renegade bolt was back in place, but this screwed into an aluminum head, I didn't know how much torque I needed to keep it snug long term and, on the other hand, how much torque would strip the threads and REALLY screw me, and I didn't have a torque wrench even if I DID know. So I took it to him for a quick inspection and proper massage.

We talked as he worked (he also went ahead and adjusted valve lash, as long as it was there and opened up), and I was talking about that. He told me a story of when he was a kid and his dad was a mechanic.

He was working on something, over torqued some hardware, and sheared it off. Oops.

His dad then set him to work on something. He parked him at a workbench, plopped down a whole coffee can full of nuts and bolts, and made him go through and tighten down every piece in the can and twist them in half.

He thought he was being punished, at the time. He said he didn't realize until much later that this was actually a lesson. Bt doing that, he developed a feel for where it was getting to the point where you were fully tightened, and cranking any harder was going to twist something to death.


The moral of the story is.... some stuff you have to learn by getting somebody who knows how to do it right to sit down and show you right in front of you, and then sit down yourself and do it yourself a whole bunch and fuck up a bunch of stuff until you get your act together.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Do like gene says. Get some sort of kits. Simple, cheap kits. Put them together. Burn semiconductors to death. Make cold joints. Lift the pads right off PC boards a few times. Do all the bad stuff. Get somebody who knows how to do it right to show you. Look closely at what a good, nice solder joint looks like.


That's how to do it. Can't help you much here by remote control.


JLE

[malice]

Tip: Don't use lead free solder.

re read this,


again


come on, one more time ...



btw soldering is one of the things I like about this job. Call me stoopid, but I think there is a zen of the soldering.

I meditate when I'm soldering. I listen to music I haven't got the time to listen for a year, I solder, I spend a nice quality time with myself, I relax ...

and I like the smell of soldering in the morning, smells like Ampex 256, smells like ...

Victory


:D

malice

[gbacklin]

This is a good read, that includes part numbers for solder.

soldering.pdf (http://web.media.mit.edu/~ladyada/make/tutorials/soldering.pdf)


Take Care,
Gene

[Chris Lambrechts]

I meditate when I'm soldering. I listen to music I haven't got the time to listen for a year, I solder, I spend a nice quality time with myself, I relax ...


Looks like I'm going to spend quite a bit of quality time with myself then over the next couple of months. A + B control rooms + 3 live roomsall interconnected on tiny's with like 40 pairs coming from each room just for mic lines alone.

It's not like I hate doing it ... but I doubt I'll be relaxing a lot either ... but I'll definitely give the meditating thing a thought or 3 while I'm at it.

Chris

[Trazan]

... but I'll definitely give the meditating thing a thought or 3 while I'm at it.

Chris

And you can listen to Slipperman over and over again on your new Ipod!

[Chris Lambrechts]

And you can listen to Slipperman over and over again on your new Ipod!

now why didn't I think of that myself .... thanks man ... very cool tip that one and a will do for sure.

Chris

[malice]

It's not like I hate doing it ... but I doubt I'll be relaxing a lot either


It depends if you're skilled or not.

Burn yourself puts your meditation at risk.

Or maybe this is part of the zen.

malice

[Barish]

Soldering is a piece of piss.

1) Make sure both surfaces are clean of grease and corrosion. Scrape them with a scalpel blade or the tip of tweezers if necessary. Also clean the tip of any residue solder.

2) Use an iron of appropriate wattage (if you try to solder a thick wide earthing point with a 15W iron, the surface will suck up all the heat from the tip like a heatsink before it has a chance to melt the solder, and if you try to solder a microtransistor with a 60W iron, you'll burn the bloody thing before the solder melts. So pick the one that suits the case.)

3) Press the tip of the iron on to the joint of two surfaces first, and then press the solder wire in, rather than the other way round. If you heat the surfaces first and then press the solder in, the surfaces will grab the solder better. But if you do the other way round, like melting the solder on the tip first and then trying to paste it onto the joint, all you'll get is a dirty dodgy solder blob.

4) The moment you see that the joint grabbed the solder nice shiney and triangular, pull the iron and never put it back in there again. It is done. Move onto the next.

Takes 10 minutes to write down, but a second to do it.

Easy peasy, siamesey.

B.

[eagan]

Yeah. It's not that tough. It requires knowing how to do it right, and careful attention, but it's not HARD.

And I agree that, strangely enough, once you get it down (it's not that hard!), the focus of the work does have a certain meditative flow to it when you're sitting there doing a bunch of it. It actually is kind of relaxing work, no bullshit.

One little tip comes to mind, that's aside from actually learning how to do it well. If you're sitting there with hours of work to slog through doing this, make it a point to stop every few minutes, and sit back, and focus your eyes on something in the distance for a few seconds. This goes double if you happen to be getting to an age where you could reasonably be described as getting into middle age.

One last note to add to the Barish quickie guide. You heat up the work pieces, then touch the solder to the work and get it flowing. I'll repeat this: you touch the solder to the work pieces. NOT THE IRON. This is vital. You only get a proper bond when the pieces being soldered are hot enough to melt the solder. Getting impatient and hurried and touching the solder to the iron tip to get it flowing is just not going to get you anywhere faster. You'll just make cold joints that you'll redo, or worse,you leave it and move on and really cause aggravation later.

That right there is the single biggest way most people fuck up when they've never actually been taught how to do it properly.


JLE

[Barish]

One last note to add to the Barish quickie guide. You heat up the work pieces, then touch the solder to the work and get it flowing. I'll repeat this: you touch the solder to the work pieces. NOT THE IRON. This is vital.

Yep. I thought they'd figure it by now but take no prisoners just in case anyway :Thumbsup:


Another addendum that may be necessary with the recent introduction of RoHS friendly lead-free solders, is that;

the new lead free solders have a higher melting temperature than the older ones, so your existing irons will have a hard time soldering with them if you try to stick to the same gauge of solder wire as before, for you will experience that the new solder with old thicker gauge will act like a heatsink too (I even got stunned to see once that the solder wire literally stuck on the tip of the iron and dried, would you believe....)

So, go for a thinner gauge next time.

B.