I had to click, because it turns out that I love soldering. It's relaxing and has a skill curve such that there's a trick to it but with a bit of practice, you can be someone who is really good at soldering, too.
For anyone reading, the key is to invest in a proper stereo microscope and a decent fume extractor.
I've built a simple fume extraction with an old plastic case, a 120mm fan and a sheet of carbon filter attached to a 120mm dryer / air conditioning hose. Around 15$ and good enough for soldering from time to time.
# "Microscope"
I simply use a strong (10x) magnifier glass with a LED ring (around 15$ on Amazon). I can't tell you how often I also used this thing for other purposes.
# Desoldering Pump
Because I needed it (beginners won't) I bought a ZD-8965 for 100 bucks and I'm very happy with this thing.
I have whole list of cheap beginner to intermediate equipment, that'll do until you solder (semi) professionally.
I second this comment and it really should have been higher in the hierarchy - WTF are you going to do with an expensive setup that a lit magnifier and controllable iron (with interchangeable tips) can't?
If you need a reflow oven, that's a different thing altogether, and you should probably repurpose an old toaster oven.
I delivered production boards (small run) that looked and worked great using a non-adjustable $10 30w iron (interchangeble tips, though) and a desklamp with the builtin magnifying glass.
You can't really tell the difference between a cheap setup and the expensive solder station I used in a previous employment.
Except that we're on HN so it shouldn't really surprise anyone that I'm using these "expensive" tools to solder and correct 0402 and sometimes 0201 parts.
Effectively impossible without a stereo microscope.
This is a weird take to make before you actually ask the question.
I design and prototype devices for a living. I use a combination of reflow and hand soldering depending on which stage of the process I'm working through, and/or how much trouble I might be having with some aspect or another.
For example, there have been times where I've successfully dead-bugged QFN-24 to a PCB, allowing me to verify a fix and save myself several weeks and several hundred dollars.
All of these tools are only expensive in a vacuum. The moment you're relying on them to create products, and assuming you value your time correctly, you can see them for what they are: usually one-time fixed expenses that end up saving you thousands of dollars in board revisions that you never had to order.
Meanwhile, lots of people use cars as part of their job. Even a shit car costs many times what my soldering tools cost, and nobody would show up on HN to imply that they don't need a car.
> # Desoldering Pump
>
> Because I needed it (beginners won't)
Funny you mention that, because I just instructed someone how to solder for the first time and on probably their 4th joint they needed the desoldering pump because they added too much solder. I think it's easier to teach a beginner how to use a desoldering pump than how to use desoldering braid.
I think it's easier to teach how to do good work when the instruction method prevents getting bogged down by fixing mistakes to begin with.
Too much or too little heat/time/solder/whatever? No worries; just move on to the next joint and try to get it a little bit better than the ones before.
This tends to mean working with practice materials instead of with real boards that actually have some future value, and that's quite OK. The practice has value in and of itself.
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I can't imagine having to stop all forward progress and learn how to fix a thing after so few tries of something new.
We don't throw kids straight into the batting box and watch them strike out ("Sorry kid, maybe you can try again next weekend!"); we instead provide time and materials for them practice with first, let them make mistakes over and over again, and focus on encouraging the successes.
And then -- after enough practice that a good amount of familiarity is instilled -- they eventually get to go play a game of baseball.
That might be true in some cases, but you can also use a bit of brass wool to wipe of excess solder. The iron will suck the rest of the connection pretty well.
However, this is also something where it might pay of to buy a good one (ENGINEER SS-03) instead of a cheap knock-off in the long term.
A hand operated solder sucker is like $5 though, they are talking about the station based ones that can be used to desolder the entire board with little effort.
How well does the pump work? A couple times I've had to desolder a connector or IC with lots of pins from a PCB and it's a painful process. I've always wanted to buy one of those, but I've seen lots of reports about getting clogged easily.
I rarely desolder, but I can easily justify a hundred bucks if I can avoid all that hours of work, where I'm also risking damaging an IC, lifting a pad, or something else...
I've used a couple of the ZD- ones and they are ok, but not very good quality. They don't really clog all that often, but they do fill up quickly and are very difficult and messy to clean out. They are also made of cheap plastic which will crack after a while exposed to the heat that it is. The tips for them are also low quality, and the solder will eventually dissolve them, making the hole in the middle of the tip larger and larger until it doesn't work anymore. All of them do technically work, but don't expect them to last.
I went and bought the "proper" Hakko FR-301 and it's an improvement in every way. Well worth the extra $100, and made me wonder why I ever wasted my time with the cheap versions. For whatever reason, the 100V Japan voltage one is about $50 cheaper than the 120V American one, so that's the one I got, but I already happened to have a source of 100VAC handy.
That was true for the older ZD-* models. The one I mentioned is in a different Ballpark (except you also meant specifically the ZD-8965).
The hakko is way better quality but beneath the price (i have no idea where you got one <300 bucks) there is another disadvantage: there is no Station and the hakko is heavy, so if you need to desolder for more than 30 mins I found it getting uncomfortable pretty quick.
Besides that the hakko is a good device. Too expensive for me though
I think the one I had was the ZD-917, which I don't even think anyone makes anymore. Assuming the ZD-8965 made some material improvements, it looks like it has the same style of reservoir with the internal spring, which is one of the main issues I had with it. I found that the spring would become eventually become trapped inside a large solder blob, making cleaning difficult. Then, you have to line up the filter and keep everything together while reinstalling it. For whatever reason, the tolerancing on mine made this especially difficult, and I eventually broke the glass tube when trying to reinstall it (replaced with an aluminium tube). Hakko version has no internal spring, and has enough tolerance to easily remove the reservoir.
The rubber grommet on the front also eventually lost its grip around the small brass tube that comes out from the iron, so it would leak and not suck as hard. The hakko version presses its grommet against a flat plate instead, so that doesn't happen.
Still, both are much better than the "squeeze bulb" style desoldering iron I had before them.
Sometimes you need combination of desoldering gun, wick and also low melt solder and then those "tubes" that repel solder that you can wrap around the leg whilst heating it.
I've had bad experiences with USB irons, they generally don't have stellar compatibilty with USB power banks, and when your 60W iron can only draw 20W from your 100W power bank or PSU (but sometimes it works).
They even come with these compatibility wikis of what PSU or bank to buy.
I simply cannot recommend a Pinecil + compatible 20A battery pack enough. Not being tied to a socket is amazing and the device is good to go in literally seconds!
With you overall, but given the toxicity of the fumes some quality / rated fume extraction might be the one area where cheap/self made item isn't worth it
If you're doing it a lot, then it's definitely worth making sure it works properly. If you're doing it occasionally, just make sure the area is well ventilated and you're not outright inhaling the fumes coming off the solder, and it's not likely to make any real difference to the health of your lungs.
"Well ventilated" on its own is completely insufficient. If you are soldering without any fan or extraction, you _will_ inhale fumes because you have to look right over your work when you solder, which is exactly where the fumes are.
In general, the danger with soldering fumes is not the average concentration in the room in which you're working over the duration of a session, it's inhaling the very high concentration of fumes right as the soldering happens.
We could debate how much damage this is going to do and whether it's worth worrying about, but there isn't really room to debate that ventilation alone is going to do absolutely nothing.
Well ventilated area + fan is probably okay, but you need the fan right next to your soldering iron or it needs to be a gigantic fan otherwise, again, you are just going to inhale most of those fumes.
I haven't soldered in a while, but I had really good luck with the metcal models. The tips auto match the proper temp, and don't require as much cleaning.
I can absolutely see how someone would hate soldering without good equipment.
Actually, the "key" to soldering is finally buying oneself a very good iron. I learned soldering years ago (going on 50 or so now) but always used basic "wood burners". But I did enough that I got good at it with the rug burners.
A couple years back, I bought a low end no-name temp controlled iron, and it worked ok. A little better than the wood burner, but nothing great. Then about three years ago I bought a used Metcal SP200 Smartheat off of eBay for about $120. The tips are pricey (although Thermaltronics makes clone tips that cost less than genuine Metcal tips) but the difference in soldering performance is like night and day, even when one already knows how, but has just never used the really good systems.
If you don't have space for a microscope, you can also get yourself the long-range (~400mm) 2.5-3.5x magnifiers that you may have seen your dentist wear. They're easily available on Amazon, not too expensive, and comfortable for hours of wearing. These are 2-element lenses that work really well.
Higher magnification variants (8x etc) are not nearly as comfy. They get quite long, heavy and expensive. I tried them and did not like them nearly as much. Also beware of short viewing distance, ultra-cheap products that are just a single lens element per eye.
I have a Donegan DA-5 OptiVisor Headband Magnifier. They're nice, because the lenses are prism'd so that you can focus on something close without having to go cross-eyed.
No problem! The only helping hands I'd recommend are https://omnifixo.com/. Pricy, but everything else I've tried has too much play and is useless to me. Omnifixo is just fantastic.
using no magnification, and only cheap soldering tools.
You can and should be able to solder SMD with only an iron and tweezers. Not everything; not the smallest stuff, but you don't start there. My sweet spot is 0805 or 0603 size components and 1.27mm pitch SOIC parts, which I actually find easier to solder than through hole, because you never have to flip the board over.
My recommendations for most useful tools are a Pinecil, a few packs of cheap flush cutters from Amazon (even expensive ones get dull or break), a cheap pair of sharp tweezers [1], and a tube of flux [2]. You don't always need extra flux if using flux-core solder, but enough flux can turn even the crappiest solder joints into good ones.
Most of the rest of the skill comes from being able to brace your hands against things to get fine control, while being far enough away to not burn yourself.
Magnification unfortunately comes down to how good your eyes are. If you can see your fingerprints clearly at arm's length, your vision is already good enough. If not, no big deal, get a cheap microscope like this one first [3], or a loupe, or some strong reading glasses, or one of those headband visor things with lenses in them.
I've got nothing against personal projects that use THD.
However, unless you're making simple circuits, avoiding SMD means that you are effectively constraining yourself to about 20% of the ICs being produced today.
It's also simply a fact that producing a product using THD components is a massive headache. It takes far more manual effort, most contract manufacturers will charge a pound of flesh, and the components are significantly bigger.
If none of those resemble problems you have to deal with, then THD is likely going to be great fun for you.
I never said anything about there being "one weird trick", just that I love soldering and I do it quite often. It's therefore not at all surprising that I would invest in good tools, especially given that my eyesight has failed a lot faster than I am comfortable with in my late 40s.
As I wrote about it in my comment, I started to list some tools that I have come to appreciate. I didn't even mention my pick and place or my CNC. Does it upset you that I have these, too?
Quite simply, you don't need to buy anything to practice this skill, but a stereo microscope is strongly recommended to anyone doing this multiple times a week.
Once I have developed a technique for soldering surface mount components, using lots of flux, soldering became a joy event for me.
The cheapest Hakko iron (888?) and a flat fine tip works great. I have a stereo microscope but I only use it for checking defects afterwards. A 10x magnifier works just fine.
The new breed of irons with temperature measurement built into the tip (invented by JBC, cloned by Geeboon and similar) is amazing. The tip heats to exactly the temp you want in 3 seconds, then cools down to avoid damage when you put it back in the stand. As you solder, the power is automatically controlled to keep the tip at the specified temp regardless of the load you put on it. I never thought I'd replace the Weller station I've used for 20 years, but I'm glad I did.
Edit: For a specific recommendation, look for the Geeboon TC22 on AliExpress or Amazon. Don’t forget the tips, you may need to get them separately.
I have bought the TC22 after going on r/Soldering and can only stand by the recommendation, its an amazing iron for hobbyists and its ability to put tons of power on a tiny area quickly means basically its 100% easier to work with than a ton of cheap irons, and have a much lower chance of killing components than dicking around with less powerful ones and staying on the pin a long time trying to heat it up while it wicks heat away into sensitive electronics. Doubly so when I mess it up or the solder is not fully melted. Another nice thing is with powerful irons you don't have to overshoot the melting temp of solder as much, and tips with less thermal mass in general can be used.
Im a rank amateur so take what I said with a grain of salt. With that said, I have made several cool things in my life that many people've said I could charge money for. I guess you can't really see the mess I made when you can't look inside the housing :)
I've purchased it from the GEEBOON Store on Aliexpress (no affiliate or anything just looked up my order history):
It heats to exactly the temperature I want in 3 seconds? Is there evidence to support this claim?
(My bullshit detector is making some rather profound gurgling sounds.)
edit: Seriously, my dudes. Links, or it never happened. Anecdotes are just anecdotes. Anecdotally, my soldering iron heats up very quickly as well and I'm very pleased with this, but I'm not making a claim that it heats to an exact, unspecified user-selected temperature in 3 seconds. If you want to present a benchmark, then please present the bench -- with the mark.
Though from looking at some of the chatter about it online, this is only one specific tip they make under ideal conditions, and it seems like often they overshoot the temperature by more than a little on warmup (though this will be the slowest to recover with the tip just held in air as opposed to when actually soldering). Either way, I've used similar products and this kind of speed isn't a crazy suggestion to me.
My TS101 heats up in like 3-4 seconds (330c) on a 100W laptop PD USB C. It doesn't have a lot of mass but it's perfect for microcontroller related stuff. Just not power electronics.
I understand the skepticism, but it's really just a simple application of negative feedback. There's a 200W-ish variable power supply, a thermocouple right at the tip, and a software PID controller. So it's no mystery why it works so well.
I can make no claims as to the brands mentioned in the parent post, but a 3 second heating time isn't all that fast for a real nice soldering iron. Previous job had an iron that'd heat between you picking it up and moving it over to the PCB. That one was stupendously expensive from what I heard, but I can only imagine that tech has gotten a lot cheaper since then.
> Previous job had an iron that'd heat between you picking it up and moving it over to the PCB. That one was stupendously expensive from what I heard, but I can only imagine that tech has gotten a lot cheaper since then.
Metcal Fixed Temperature Induction soldering irons. Still the gold standard after decades because instead of using PID with a heating element and sensor, it exploits the curie effect. The tips are made of a special alloy that is only magnetic until a certain temperature after which it doesn’t absorb any more energy from the PSU, which just dumps a constant 25Mhz signal into the tip keeping it at the fixed temperature.
When their patents expired a couple of Metcal engineers left to found Thermaltronics, which makes the same soldering iron (they’re even tip compatible!) for 2-3x cheaper. They’re still more expensive than hobbyist soldering irons but well worth the cost for anyone doing a lot of soldering. The Metcal power supplies are beasts though so you can easily pick up a 20 year old unit for a couple hundred bucks on ebay and it’ll run till the apocalypse comes home to roost. I have an old unit made in the late 90s that is still going strong.
I have a Hakko FX-888D. It's pretty good, although I wish there was some way to switch tips that didn't involve letting it cool down to a safe handling temperature.
I am curious what you mean by rework tweezers. Link please!
I go through these for solder flux removal like crazy, in combination with an aerosol can of MG Chemicals 4140-400G. Sadly, I think that stuff is unobtainium now.
Depends. The ancient Weller that I have has a sleeve you can unscrew but that sucker gets burning hot, and the thumbscrew locks up unless you cool the tip down, which you can do by holding the thing on your wet sponge.
How ofter are you switching tips? It's been a while since I did any real soldering, but I don't remember often needing to switch in the middle of a session.
I swap the tips on my Hakko without letting it cool down, I just use a Knipex pliers wrench so I don't burn myself. I keep my spare tips in an altoids tin, so I can drop the hot one in there without burning anything.
Havent clicked but I LOVE SOLDERING! It’s relaxing, gives a real sense of creating something. Yes even soldering hundreds of the same units every day feels just so gratifying somehow… the way you get better and faster every unit, having this batch of new shiny things lined up, giving ‘life’ to otherwise inert pieces of a puzzle. Yes.
I, too, love soldering. I've done it since I was around 6 years old (wood burning before that). It's what I do when I want to zone out and relax. I've found random people at Burning Man and camping events who needed help with electronics, and I was happy to spend my time with an iron helping out - I even carry a butane-powered one on my motorcycle for quick repairs in the field.
>It's relaxing and has a skill curve such that there's a trick to it but with a bit of practice, you can be someone who is really good at soldering, too.
What about aluminum? I haven’t been able to find a welder willing to work on my custom bike frame, so I’m considering learning to do it myself after taking a welding course. The custom car builders on TV make it look easy, but aluminum seems like an incredibly difficult material to work with.
It's difficult find a welder willing to work on an aluminum bike frame not because aluminum is hard to weld. It's not so bad to stick two pieces of aluminum together in a new-to-them way with the right tools as long as maintaining the original strength isn't important.
But strength is important for bicycles. And aluminum bike frames are already built down to a given weight -- they don't have much in the way of extra strength to lend.
The heat of welding permanently changes the way the surrounding metal works. That's not ideal for safety devices like a bike.
Heat treatment can be done later (and is done when aluminum frames are built), but that's a different process to learn and it's pretty far beyond the gamut of what most welders are willing to deal with. Most welders don't have the bike-sized oven that's needed, let alone the training and experience to get it right, and with a sample size of exactly 1 it's a risky operation. It's easy to get things like warped tubes out of this process and turn a beautiful piece of wall art into scrap metal.
If you get a quality tig welder aluminum isn't too bad. It's definitely more difficult than steel but I taught myself to weld AL without too much trouble. Practice on some scrap for sure before your bike - it'll be easy to blow a hole in thin bike tube.
The biggest challenge I've had in welding aluminum as a hobbyist is that I rarely know what aluminum alloy I'm working with. Most things don't say what type so we're left guessing what filler is appropriate. If you use the wrong filler it could be prone to cracking again in the future.
Also for thicker aluminum preheating is very important. The aluminum transfers heat away very quickly so you get cold lumpy welds if you don't have both parts pretty hot at the start.
I agree it seems like it could be fun. I think I am a bit paranoid about the hazardous chemicals and risk of a burns when using a traditional iron. From what I understand reading the comments, it's gotten much smoother with stencils, SMD, ovens, and so on.
The most important thing is having your workspace organized. Second most important is to put your iron in the holder when you're doing anything else. ADHD types will get more little burns.
> It's relaxing and has a skill curve such that there's a trick to it but with a bit of practice, you can be someone who is really good at soldering, too.
I don't know. I've got my station, not a bad one: bought it with the help of a buddy who's very good at soldering. He tried to show me. I've got no choice: I own an old vintage arcade cab from the mid 80s and it's located in the middle of nowhere, in a rural area. So I have to fix it myself.
And oh boy do I suck at it. I watched vids, countless Youtube vids. It's been 10 years and everytime I need to solder something, I still suck at it.
I've come to terms with the fact that there are some things I'm good at and that soldering is never ever going to be one of these. And it's okay.
I'm not trying to convince you of anything, but if all of your soldering experience is from parts that came out of a 40 year-old arcade cabinet, don't beat yourself up: that is definitely what I would call soldering in hard mode. Depending on where it lived, everything in it is probably oxidized, corroded and covered in dust, cigarette tar, and possibly cooking oil. Even if you can't see/smell any of it, it's still there. Solder only works well on pristine, clean metals. Some metals are just simply marginal, and don't take solder well even if they were ostensibly designed for it. Flux helps, but can only do so much. The semi-good news is that you should stand a chance if you can clean the bejeezus out of whatever it is your soldering a LOT of alcohol and a stiff brush, and maybe some fine-grit sandpaper.
Will second this. When modding Xbox 360s, I used MrMario's guides and he would say repeatedly "clean, flux, tin", kinda stuck in my head. I did also tend to just clean the whole board while it was apart, but especially the point you're about to solder should be clean.
I have never used sandpaper on electronics, but I perhaps similarly use a fiberglass pen. Total game changer for getting old cartridge pins to read again for SNES and GBA games and such. Highly recommend picking one up.
Ah thanks to all of you for the nice comments. I didn't really realize this: I may not despair yet and still give it some more tries. I'll probably keep a few tiny PCBs (say from broken computer mouses) around and cut cables (so that they're not oxidized) and give it a go again and see if I can get a bit better at it.
I don't want to flog a dead horse, but can you confirm whether or not you have a stereo microscope or not?
I cannot stress enough that this is not a trivial detail. I spent my whole life thinking that I was simply terrible at soldering. Then I got a proper stereo microscope and now I feel like a freaking ninja.
Seriously, you do not know if you're bad at soldering until you've spent an hour with a proper STEREO microscope. All of the folks saying "just get a 10x magnifier loupe for $5" are completely missing the point.
If you give your brain a stereo view, you will suddenly be like Neo in the Matrix. Thank me later.
I also get to fix gear in the middle of nowhere, so I'm sympathetic to that plight.
I used to watch people with fancy-looking soldering irons working quickly on stuff in repair shops. Some of that was technique ("it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools"), but some of it was definitely the irons they were using.
And yet: My first soldering experiences were not very good.
The first soldering irons I had, starting 30 years ago or so, were resolutely terrible. I eventually gained a whole assortment of them -- big, medium, small, and ginormous. They were all awful in their own unique ways, and they all lacked a thermostatic temperature control.
I got better solder (I've become a big fan of Kester 44 in a eutectic 63/37 mix) fairly early on, which helped a ton.
Later, I got better soldering irons.
A dozen years ago I bought a Hakko clone temperature-controlled soldering station from an American distributor. It took genuine Hakko tips just fine, and it was better.
5 or 6 years ago, I got a Pinecil v1. I now own two of them: I bought one as a spare in case one broke somehow (it's hard to fix a soldering iron without a soldering iron), but they've both been reliable. It's miles ahead of what I've used before. The v2 should be a bit better yet, but I do not own one of those. They're rather inexpensive.
These Pinecil irons weren't available a decade ago. I wish they had been.
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Anyway: With the tools decently in-check, my technique got a lot better in a big hurry. I thought I'd learned to be pretty OK at soldering before with my lackluster tools, but the Pinecil iron (and its consistent temperature, sleep modes, and very quick heat-up) helps me get much better results -- faster.
And it's hackable, which (to me) scores some geek points.
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I've come to think that anybody can learn to solder electronics with reasonable proficiency. I've taught people to solder who were sure they couldn't do it, including people who started off by being surprised by how hot the hot-bits are and walking them back from the ledge.
As with many other skills, it mostly just takes practice. But that practice should be inconsequential -- it's a lot easier to learn when the result is completely unimportant and inconsequential than on a dear 40-year-old arcade board.
To that end: There's ridiculously-inexpensive kits these days that primarily exist just to teach soldering. I learned through-hole the old-fashioned way (by failing), but back then cheap kits didn't exist at the level they do today. :)
If you can tell me more about the specific problems you're having with soldering, I can provide links to specific, specific soldering kits that may help.
(I can provide hands-on help, too, if you're not too far away. No big deal.)
> (I can provide hands-on help, too, if you're not too far away. No big deal.)
Arcade cab would be located in France, on the french riviera, 45 minutes from the closest highway, in a sea-side but rural (lots of vineyards) area.
But I want to thank you very much for the explanation and offer to help!
Nothing in particular: typically it's the wiring around the joysticks and buttons that gives me the most trouble for the wire harness kinda "weighs" on it, then kid play like maniacs, and eventually a solder fails and has to be redone.
Now on the plus side I did buy a chinese JAMMA harness and did manage to solder everything but the result is fuglier than fugly: that's why I say I'm really bad at it. Basically I can do "gross" soldering, but not nice looking, precise ones.
I'll practice a bit though after the kind words from everybody.
Yeah, France is a little bit out for me. There's quite a big pond between here and there. :)
So... joysticks, and buttons. Don't those have microswitches? With connectors on each switch?
Crimping the correct mating terminals can be more reliable than soldering. (Crimp-on connectors are what keeps airplanes up in the sky.)
Perhaps the right answer to soldering arcade controls is to stop soldering altogether. :)
Solder does have a big advantage, though, in that it is very universal. Any random copper wire can be glued onto any random terminal with molten metal, and that's pretty neat because it doesn't take any specialized parts or tools to make this work.
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Anyway, I promised to help. For that kind of soldering, my usual workflow goes like something like this:
1. Cut off the end of the wire (for nice clean copper) and strip back the insulation a bit.
2. Heat up the iron and prep it (apply solder, wipe it off along with oxides, maybe apply more solder; it should be shiny and wet, but not with globs of stuff on it)
3. Tin the exposed copper wire. Heat it up while applying solder, until the solder flows through the strands freely. Too hot/too long means that a bunch of solder flows down past the insulation, which isn't ideal. Too cold/not long enough means that it kind of globs instead of flows. Perfect is somewhere in the middle. Set it aside to cool down.
4. Tin the terminal. Just heat it up with solder applied, until there's a neat little easily-flowing pool of it, and then let it cool down some. If the solder's flux core starts to burn, you're taking too long. If it blobs, it's not hot enough or not clean enough. Somewhere in the middle is, again, perfect.
5. Stick them together. Place the tinned wire on the tinned terminal so they "want" to rest together naturally (there's jigs that help with this kind of fixturing). And then, heat up the combination of the two with the iron. The solder that's mixed up with the wire will become one with the pool of solder on the terminal, and that's good. Often, there's no additional solder required for this step (but sometimes it's useful to add more). Again: Too hot and the solder flows away and the flux burns. Too cold, and it looks weird and instead of glassy. In the middle is good.
6. Remove heat. Don't move anything but the iron; just let the temperature drop until things turn solid.
Anyway, wire is easy to find. And a bag of cheap switches shouldn't cost too much. :)
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Now, that said: I live in the States, where we never adopted RoHS. It's very simple for me to get solder with lead in it and that's the usual thing to see on any repair bench.
Lead-free solder is relatively unusual, and is not something I care to work with any more than I have to. I do not enjoy encountering it during repairs, mostly because it seems like it takes an astounding amount of heat to get it to do anything but laugh at me.
And really, for occasional hobbyist use, lead isn't a problem: Wash your hands afterwards, keep your work area clean, and don't let kids play with it. :)
> It's relaxing and has a skill curve such that there's a trick to it but with a bit of practice, you can be someone who is really good at soldering, too.
Over the last 30 years or so I have very (very) occasionaly soldered some basic stuff to build simple IoTs. Everytime this was (and is) a struggle (with a cheap equipment, no practice etc.)
And then someday I discovered on Youtube a video of someone resoldering some elements (chips, flat resistors, ...) using some kind of gel and a heat gun (?) and it was mermerizing. So clean, so fluid -- seriously a relaxing experience
There isn't much advantage to even learning on lead in my opinion, unless your only goal is to work on old stuff that used leaded solder.
Any modern or new stuff (i.e. the smallest components) has the whole supply chain designed around lead-free. Lead free boards, using lead free chips, which are meant to take the heating profiles for lead free solder. If working in industry, you'll need to learn lead free eventually, so you had better do it from the beginning.
I save my leaded solder for old radios and retrocomputing, but as I would rather not spread lead dust around my work area, I only ever use lead-free solder paste for modern work.
Leaded work is easier, a little, but not so much so that I wouldn't consider not learning lead-free.
For anyone thinking about learning to solder, there are several levels of what you can do with a soldering iron. The surface-mount stuff and ovens and microscopes, that's like level 3.
Level 1 is just being able to take two wires and connect them, reliably and cleanly. That's already immensely useful and requires very little skill and equipment. $50 gets you a nice soldering pen, another $50 gets you some tweezers, some flux and a roll of solder and you're set. Work near an open window and have a desk fan blow the fumes away from you, and you're already being more responsible than most people.
Level 2 is something like through-hole soldering, soldering wires to pads, the kind of stuff you'd do working with ESP32, building RC cars, FPV drones or custom IoT devices. Still easy to learn, just a few simple rules. Work quickly, know when to give up and let things cool down. Avoid touching the expensive e-ink display with your soldering iron. Get something better for fume extraction, spend 10 hours soldering and bam, you're better at soldering than literally 99% people out there, you can build and repair all kinds of stuff. This is where most of the cool YouTube stuff happens, your rctestflight and Tom Stanton and Stuff Made Here and Styropyro. You can do most of that with $300-$800 worth of gear, depending on how brave you are.
And then you can worry about SMDs and reflowing and other arcane stuff, or decide that you probably won't need it.
In my head, the levels are exactly swapped. Connecting two wires together reliably is harder than through-hole in my experience. Through-hole PCBs are actually designed for solder, so surface tension basically does your job for you. Also, with the PCB you have a solid surface to push on, whereas with two wires everything's a little bit more loose. Lastly, if you want the connection between the wires to actually be reliable, you're probably looking at splicing, which takes some more skill yet.
Interesting. I guess I see through-hole stuff as more advanced because if a PCB is involved, there’s usually something expensive around there that you can actually damage with a (genuinely!) poor soldering technique. Through-hole or pads, that’s ESPs and drone flight controllers territory for me, or building DIY batteries.
A random frayed power cord, well, you can dump a ton of heat in it and start 6 times over and it won’t really matter. Worst case you replace some isolation or a warped connector.
You don't need $300 gear to do Level 2. A lot of people who are pretty up there the "pro" scale use something similar to a FNIRSI DWS-200 200W, which I bought for $90, with shipping. It comes with 8 tips, and is extremely tight, supports fast tip switching, very fast heating (auto-spleep, etc), very nice interface, short tip, etc. Yes, the tip is not well-calibrated temp wise, but you can get a non-certified calibrator for $15. I work on RC planes and associated flight controllers with it all day long. The annoyingly expensive area is the hot air station, actually, but that's really a bit "out there" -- the cheap(er) copies don't yet exist, so it's still on the expensive side. A good hot air station is where it's more like lev 2.5 -- with it, you can do HDMI/USB port changes reliably, and in seconds. The BGA etc. is lev 3.
Beyond the soldering iron, my recommendations that are not too obvious at first sight:
* solder paste (verrrry useful, just get it, and use it)
* something to purify air that _pulls_ it (a reverse fan) with a carbon filter (~30 USD)
* magnifying glass, hopefully attached to a ring of LEDs + a stand so you can see what you are doing (30-60 USD)
I do a lot of SMD rework and TBH soldering two wires together cleanly can still be a bigger pain in the backside. It's different, but not necessarily much more difficult (until you get to footprints like QFNs and BGAs where you can't see the pads at all, at least).
I am very new to the crafts and I can attest trying to solder smd stuff, with correct equipment is way easier than soldering 2 wires correctly together. And I also kinda hate QFN like packages where you can’t see the pads.
One of reasons I think people who don't have training in it struggle with soldering is Hollywood's depiction of it. You typically see the actor make a quick stabbing motion with the soldering iron, as if wielding a knife. The solder will already be held against the wire or PCB pad, and in comes the stab. It's almost as comically bad as Hollywood's depictions of computer 'hacking'.
Proper order of operations:
(1) soldering iron to metal first to heat up the wire / pad / pin
(2) apply solder at junction of soldering iron and wire / pad / pin
(3) remove solder
(4) remove iron
And the most important basic tip is to make sure you have the appropriate soldering iron tip for the job. Pointy tips intended for precision work don't provide enough heat transfer for soldering larger pads or wires.
IMHO soldering two wires together (or wires to connectors) is much harder and requires higher dexterity than through-hole soldering on PCB, which is really easy. PCB holds parts in place and directs solder where it belongs.
I find SMD the easiest. Using a pinecil soldering iron, or a cheap hot air station. Then through hole, because it's annoying to hold and flip the PCB around without everything falling. And finally soldering two wires is just an exercise in frustration. Helping hands or not, it's just plain annoying.
Everything is lead-free surface mount now. Solder paste, stencils, reflow ovens.
Hand soldering is precision temperature controlled irons, hot air rework stations, magnifiers, cameras, and exhaust fans. The tools are more complicated, more expensive, and better.
One of the lessons of surface mount work is that you really can move your fingers a thousandth of an inch. But you need magnification to see what you're doing.
I'm encouraged to see more hobbyists going surface mount. In my TechShop days, I was the only one doing surface mount. Everybody else was using 1980s 0.1 inch spacing DIP components. That's a US thing. If you learn to solder in Shenzhen, you start with surface mount.
Leaded solder is easier to work with for personal projects. Careful hand washing and handling is required, but it's easy.
I also recommend people go to surface mount, but I don't recommend beginners immediately go for expensive microscopes and reflow ovens. Stick to 0806 components or larger to start and you can populate a board without any binocular microscope or magnification as long as your eyesight isn't too bad. I can populate 0402 components without magnification all day long.
For small boards, reflow on one of those cheap hot plates. They're small enough to back in the drawer when you're done.
Surface mount doesn't have to be hard or expensive, unless you're doing designs with ICs that come in very fine pitch packages.
> Leaded solder is easier to work with for personal projects
it really isn't if you use a nice modern lead-free solder. you'll need your iron to be about 20c hotter, but it's not like the early days of lead-free where it'd flow all weird.
I was extremely surprised when, out of solder recently, I just bought some Draper lead free solder from my local Home Depot(!), and it flowed so much better than my previous roll of fancy lead-free solder from a decade ago. Basically indistinguishable from leaded. I was very surprised.
not really? I have a habit of using the wrongest solder for my projects. The stuff I use currently was formulated for wave soldering, no clue why it comes in spools but it was cheap.
In general the formulation is more important than the brand, and the formulation isn't /that/ important either. If it's lead free, has a rosin core, and comes on a spool, you can probably use it.
Give a shot to the SAC305 mix. It’s a low temperature lead-free alloy, and it’s the one that made me ditch leaded solder definitively. Use more flux and a bit more iron temperature and you’ll never touch leaded solder again. Oh, and it’s available both as a hand-soldering wire reel and solder paste.
It's the 3% silver that does it. That gets the melting point down. Unfortunately, the price of silver has tripled since 2023. Hobbyists won't use enough solder to notice, but it's an issue in production.
After moving to Asia, it did seem that fewer of my colleagues remarked on my choice of SMT for everything. I hadn't really thought about it until now!
Custom PCBs are even cheaper here than in North America, and longer workdays meant I had less time for hobbies. That probably made me double down on my choice.
I don't own much fancy equipment, just a cheap hot air rework station. I've found that mixing in fresh gel flux into my solder paste to get the right consistency made a big difference, enough that I never really needed more tools.
After doing that, I just sort of smear some near-ish the pads (perversely, often using a THT resistor), drop the parts in approximately the correct position with tweezers, and heat it up gently. Surface tension handles the rest. Once in a while, an 0402 resistor shifts out of position, but otherwise it just works. I'd probably need better tools for BGA.
What I love best is that SMT microcontrollers can be very, very cheap. I like the attiny10 (36$ for 100 computers! What a wonder!). There are plenty that are under 10 cents each, but I rather like AVR assembler, and their datasheets are very good.
I tried soldering. With a TS100 (might have been a TS80P). I tried to solder a a Valetudo Dreame adapter [1]. Took me two hours, then I gave up. I attributed it partly to my unstable hand. Next day I tried to make a USB to (I think) TTL cable. Also failed, the cable wasn't reliable. The fumes were horrible, probably inhaled a lot. I ended up borrowing an adapter, and easily succeeded rooting the damn thing. Never again (the soldering, not the rooting). Same with cable crimping. These physical things are just not my cup of tea. I got two left hands. I hate soldering.
I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I have given up. Maybe it will inspire another reader. I didn't write it to discourage others, but to underline that sometimes, defeat is OK to admit, rather than keep trying.
I mean, a smell is temporary unpleasant but what happened to my health here? I am a former smoker, so I guess damage was previously done there.
This specific iron is a portable one (I had it hooked up on a powerbank), with temperature control and FOSS firmware. It was lead-free soldering tin with flux included. I held the item with my hands, so maybe it did get greased by skin oil, who knows. I had a lot of help from other more experienced people. They guided me through it, with a lot of patience. Without them, I'd been stuck way before. But even they were like... maybe this isn't for you.
My motor skills are just not that good (possibly related to my ASD or father having MS), and I notice that with everything where I gotta use my hands. From elementary school handwriting (learning to write) or even before with tasks like eating, putting clothes on, etc. That is as far back as I can remember. Ever onwards, things like sports. I am simply physically clumsy, and it requires a lot of effort and practice to get on a decent level. Can I do it? Can I hand write? Yes, I can. But it requires a lot of practice to get to a decent level. I can satisfy my wife with my hands though, probably my most important skill I am grateful for. No joke, btw. Although the fact I can, say, give myself food (eat) is probably more important, survival wise.
The one skill I would love to be able to achieve throughout my life, would be programming, not soldering. I mean, something like soldering is awesome, I am a sucker for right to repair, second hand, reusable hardware, etc something like programming comes close to, say, Lego. Though programming wise I am not sure nowadays, given AI. And there too, I tried VB, TCL, C, Java, Python. Multiple Python courses, too, from MOOC, books, to a professional teacher in a classroom. I've been (and am) able to make small adjustments to code, and do some shell scripting (and mIRC scripting, but that was roughly 30 years ago). That's it. That is without AI, I haven't bothered with that. I like to run LLMs locally.
> It was lead-free soldering tin with flux included.
Flux core solder is crap. It doesn’t contain enough flux to begin with and since it’s inside the solder, it can’t actually do the work it’s supposed to. You need to apply flux separately before soldering, and lead-free solder used to be harder to work with. That’s the leading mistake I’ve seen frustrate beginners.
Steady hands aren’t a requirement unless you’re doing very complex repairs like threading wire through a BGA grid. You’re supposed to use the surface tension of the solder to snap the component’s pins to the PCB pads. After you snap two corners to the pads, you can just glide a tip with some solder over the rest of the pins and the heat and flux do the rest of the work (the flux’s main job is actually changing the solder’s surface tension to make this easier and more predictable).
>Steady hands aren’t a requirement unless you’re doing very complex repairs
I remember I was in college when I tried to solder some jump points on my xbox to enable me to mod it. I went in expecting electronics to look like what they did when I was growing up (I used to take everything apart, but I usually was able to put it back together). I open it up to find the jump points are smaller than grains of sand. It left me very much wanting some sort of mechanical aide to help. I occasionally watch videos of people repairing gpus or mbs and I cannot imagine how they do it.
Toys like the TS100 are not what people think they are, and tend to cause more harm than good.
Thermal mass is important, please have a look at my other post for a recommended tutorial set. Silver based solders like SAC305 will also stick to most plated pin types.
Sometimes people are given a BS fools errand, and convince themselves there is some hidden secret to workmanship. You would have been better off with a $25 30W Weller iron and $7 flux+Wick kit off Amazon for through-hole style PCB kits. =3
It's also shockingly easy to just get boards made and populated these days. I of course have a station but I use it less and less.
I paid like 40€ last week for 5 smaller PCBAs, 0402s all nice and correct, jumpers, all my ICs. Don't have to worry about diode orientation or solder bridges. Just complete boards shipped to me. Easily beats my own labour rates.
I use jlcpcb, they're common in the prototype and hobby domains. But there's quite a few board houses in taiwan and china that do this, definitely shop around.
The annoying part is getting the bom and component placement files correct. I use kicad since it's free, and there's solid instructions from most houses on what they need.
JLBPCB does small runs cheap as a loss leader, so they get the production runs, if any, later. Also, they get to see what people are doing, in case something interesting goes by.
There's also a suspicion that JLBPCB may be encouraged to do this by the Party, to discourage other countries from maintaining an independent prototyping capability.
Pinecil RISC-V soldering iron with the Pinecil V2 featuring a new Bouffalo Lab BL706 RISC-V microcontroller with Bluetooth LE connectivity, optimizations for higher power levels, as well as tentative support for the new USB PD EPR standard (Extended Power Range) working at up to 28V.
I picked up soldering around the time lead-free solder started being required in the EU, so imagine my frustration when suddenly stuff stopped unsoldering like it should.
Of course a lot of electronics were compliant before 2006, but that point in time marked the moment when even the most suspicious dropshipped Chinese items had to use it and suddenly you needed way more heat to do the same things.
I love soldering, even though my skill ceiling is SMD components. There is something almost spiritual and humbling about soldering because you cannot force your will onto the solder, you have to listen to what the solder wants to do and work with it, not against it.
When I first tried my hand at soldering I was using the "butter knife" method: apply solder to the iron, then try to smear it onto the wire like spreading butter with a butter knife. Of course the solder would never stick to where I wanted it to go. I had to learn that solder goes to where the heat is, so I instead had to heat the components or wires instead and then feed the solder onto the hot components. I also had to learn that a soldering iron is not a pencil, sometimes even when doing small parts you want to use the large tip. Don't try to tell the solder where to go, instead apply a big blog and watch it snap into place on its own.
Last year I installed an HDMI mod[1] into my Wii, this has been so far the hardest project. It took me many attempts to get it right, mainly because I was working against the solder instead of with it. But now that I have succeeded I could easily do it over and over again (not keen on the disassembly and reassembly of the console though).
EDIT: while I'm at it I might as well mention the iron I was using: the Pinecil[2]. It's a really neat and fast soldering iron at a very cheap price. Great for people like me who don't want hardware store cheap garbage, but also cannot justify buying an entire soldering station.
Several tips helped me move from "painting with solder" to "hmm, that's acceptable": "heat the component, not the solder", "taping things to the table saves a hand", "use an analog, not digital, soldering iron", "clean your tip clean". Those, combined with practice, mean that I can do basic electronics work. I still accidentally melt insulation, and damage things from time to time.
Switching from a Weller to a Pinecil was also pretty nice although I'm sure everything I do, I could do with my analog weller.
Flux, liberally applied, is the sudo of soldering. It lets you force your will and make the solder do what you want. No one ever uses enough. I always have either a pen with a felt tip, or a syringe of chip quik.
It (a good proper flux) is what most people are missing when they struggle with SMD, the flux makes the solder almost magnetic and it jumps perfectly to the pad and the component. Mess up, make a bridge or bad connection? Add more and wave the tip through like a magic wand. Poof. Fixed.
Thanks for coming to my Church of Flux presentation.
The flux in flux core solder is completely useless for PCB soldering, It needs to already be on the PCB when the molten solder meets it because its main purpose is wetting the surfaces and reducing the surface tension of the solder so that it flows easier. Properly fluxed solder behaves very differently from the stubborn solder balls people normally experience when starting out.
I got into soldering as a child, but never learned how to do it properly. Years later I found this comic-book-style guide somewhere online, which made it quite easy to do without messing it up: https://mightyohm.com/files/soldercomic/FullSolderComic_EN.p...
Important to note that these days you really should use lead-free solder. You'll find all sorts of people going around claiming that leaded is better, but it's really not, and it's not worth the health risk. Your iron needs to be about 20c hotter than for leaded and your solder joints will look dull instead of shiny. If you find lead-free solder to not flow properly to be grainy your iron isn't hot enough.
Still wash your hands after using lead-free solder by the way. You don't want to be eating rosin or copper either.
This is somewhat off topic, but a question to Americans: Why do none of you seem to pronounce the "l" in soldering? Every US video seems to say "soddering"
He is right though with a shitty solder iron its just not fun.
My 50Euro hardware store solder iron was garbage. Bought one of these pencil type solders for 100 Euro years later and that small thing was 10x better than the heavey shitty hardware store solder iron.
I'm sure a good station makes it even nicer but if your normal iron doesn't get hot fast and doesn't keep it properly hot, you can play lots of guessing games why your stuff doesn't do what that person on youtube is showing you how it should work
Love-hate relationship here. I make and fly drones as a hobby (mostly build-since around July last year, 98% of the times, when weekends come, it's always raining). While soldering can be fun, I hate soldering big, fat cables on large pads, it's just so tedious, even with a powerful soldering iron.
I feel like this poem isn't really about soldering, but if anyone is actually bothered by it, there are some options.
Unleaded solder and a decent fume extractor make the process cleaner. A decent soldering iron and solder wire with good-quality flux (e.g. Kester) makes it faster.
If you'd rather not deal with the iron, you can manually apply solder paste and use a hot air rework tool or even a heat gun (careful!) to melt it. (A proper reflow oven is better, of course, but that's pricey.) This makes working with surface-mount components much easier.
If you'd rather not deal with it at all, have a PCB assembled somewhere else. JLC is pretty cheap, especially on simpler boards.
>A proper reflow oven is better, of course, but that's pricey.
You can do a lot worse than a $55 temperature controlled hot plate. Plus you can watch the magic happen. Of course that only works for single sided boards. I've been very impressed with the results.
My first part-time job was at this old appliance store, I was 14. In the back they had a small repair shop, from ye olden days when such stores actually repaired stuff. The repairman was this older gentleman that used to work in telecom, but had retired back to his small home town (where we lived), and repaired the stuff at the shop, at his own leisure. Let's just say things took forever, and the backlog was probably as long as the stores inventory.
But my first day there, after dusting and throwing cardboard, he asked me "Hey kid, wanna learn on how to solder?" and we spent a good hour going through the basics. That sparked my interest in electronics, and put me on my path the electrical engineering.
I still do a lot of soldering, as I build guitars, and repair audio equipment. I enjoy the tranquility soldering gives me...the things that usually suck, is not the soldering itself, but the environment you work in. You don't always get the circuit boards out. Sometimes you're working in a rats nest. Sometimes you don't helping hands.
Thanks for all the advice! For context, this poem was only partially about soldering. It's also about questions regarding ever-progressing technology on Earth, which I think some caught on to. I did use solder paste and a heat gun with a fume extractor after writing this poem. :)
To each their own. I find soldering (with a nice iron!) very therapeutic, much like knitting. I'll put on a good album or catch up with some friends on the phone.
If you're impatient, plenty of fab houses (like JLCPCB) will do all the soldering for you, for about 0.1 cents per SMD joint or 2 cents per THT joint...
The lead is leaded solder is entirely manageable. You should keep track of it all and dispose of it properly. (I.e. not in a landfill.) Wash your hands afterwards. It doesn't vaporize, or at least not in any quantities that you should care about.
As long as you are not directly inhaling in the flux smoke while hovering over the project, it's not that unhealthy. If you are a hobbyist doing an hour of soldering a week, you probably get more smoke particle inhalation making toast. Or pizza. Or frying literally anything.
(If I was soldering for a living, yes I'd want a really good fume extractor on the bench, though.)
This sounds like an opinion written by a "clean hands" computer scientist. Electronic engineers have it easy with their soldering - mechanical engineers deal with much more stubborn oils, greases, metal swarf...
Isopropyl alcohol removes all the soldering residue. Personally, all it took is decent equipment and some practice to make soldering enjoyable. It can be frustrating at times, but usually the problem is (lack of) heat, flux or patience.
I became significantly better at electronics soldering by learning to do glasswork (stain glass fixturing, etc). It wasn't intentional and it isn't even the same solder chemistry, but having to do broad asthetics on large pieces meant I "got it" better for the small scale electronics connections.
When i was in college I was soldering something really small (don't remember what it was) and flicked molten solder right in to the tear duct on the inside corner of one of my eyes. Not fun but didn't hurt anything permanently.
Always wear eye protection! Electrical engineers don’t think about these things cause they’re not dealing with power tools but I’ve seen a wire fly off from a wire cutter into someone’s eye doing considerable damage.
1 mistake I see a lot of beginners make is, they bite more than what they can chew.
You can not suddenly be able to replace your PS5 HDMI port if you've never soldered before. Also you need the right tool, a $20 solder is never enough.
The first time I soldered, it was for a job interview to work for a professor building gastric pacemakers after university graduation. My eyes were still sharp so it was actually kind of fun.
Soldering is fun, especially if you designed the circuit and the pcb yourself. It's like putting together your own frankenstein, with a huge amount of anticipation toward when you finally get to give it power. Just be sure to get the polarity right on those electrolytic caps ;-)
I've used pretty good soldering stations at work and at home. But I needed to set up a new station at my workplace, and asked our best technician to recommend a new unit. He recommended Hakko FX-971, and I got one despite the price (to my employer), with 3 sizes of tips.
It was a true splurge, but I love it. Warm-up in 15 seconds, and the tips are integrated with the heaters so there's no thermal contact to worry about. Tiny and big tips both work great. You can change tips while they're hot.
At home I have a typical Weller station, and it's OK for the electronics side business that I run, but nothing like that Hakko.
Use flux liberally before soldering (the flux in flux core solder is useless) and clean it off afterwards. It changes the surface tension of the solder, making it much easier to work with.
With the exception of a hot air rework tool, a soldering iron should complete a nice fillet within 3 seconds. Adjustable temperature kits tend to hide the skills needed to work with the thermal mass of the iron itself.
Brass wool is often just copper plated steel, and will damage the plating. Thus, pin holes in the tips iron, nickel, or chrome plating begin to pit the copper core.
That's certainly a concern, but it's completely ameliorated by buying real brass wool.
The stuff that came with my (apparently genuine) Hakko 599B is non-ferrous (and is therefore not steel). Refills are Hakko part 599-029.
Soldering iron tips are usually made from copper with a thick iron plating. On Moh's hardness scale, iron doesn't care much about what brass thinks. :)
Was never a fan of spendy rapid PID based mini-heaters, but some people do prefer that design.
In situations where PCB ground pours removed thermal-reliefs for power handling reasons, mini-cartridge-heaters often simply don't have enough thermal mass to heat an area fast enough without the control-loop missing temperature ranges and or time limits.
Anecdotally, same reason good portable butane catalytic iron units are often superior to USB-C/battery operated units.
Note Zinc contact is restricted in some places, and that ban includes zinc-brass sources. Best of luck =3
I disagree, it’s a joy actually, shame that jobs that involve soldering don’t pay well, yes, even embedded engineers aren’t paid that well plus soldering is less than 10% of the work.
I hate to say I love the fumes - that rosin smell is unique. Did many soldering projects in an enclosed area back when I was a kid. Everyone worked that way years ago. I wonder if the fumes kill more people than being neurotic about the fumes.
I had a friend that taught with leaded solder and say 'you can wash your hands, but you can't wash your lungs', and considered the fumes from lead-free solder as more exotic and cancerous than burning rosin. Lead free is regulated to prevent the metal from getting into the environment on a large scale, there's not health regulations around what gets burned off when hitting lead-free solder with a soldering gun at the wrong temperature. It's meant to be cooked in an oven with ventilation away from humans.
I enjoy soldering.
I enjoy using solder paste, being a human pick and place machine, and then putting boards in the oven.
I enjoy building physical devices.
But then I had a hardware startup and learnt something about myself.
I enjoy building one or two of something.
I absolutely hate building anything more than that.
Soldering is something where bad tools do genuinely make it extremely hard to do a good job. I used my dad's old soldering iron for a while, where it just plugs into the wall and gets hot, with no other temperature control than (I assume) some kind of thermal switch to stop it melting. I always hated soldering with that thing, and my joints looked awful. Then I got a pinecil, and my experience changed completely. Super cheap, heats up in seconds, does perfect soldering, and makes everything so much more fun and easy. Heavily recommend if you want to solder but are having problems with your existing iron https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-solde...
For anyone reading, the key is to invest in a proper stereo microscope and a decent fume extractor.
I recommend this one: https://www.strangeparts.com/a-boy-and-his-microscope-a-love...
If you're up for a bit of a bonus round, I absolutely love my Pixel Pump. https://shop.robins-tools.com/products/pixel-pump
I picked up a used Ninja toaster oven and hacked a https://reflowmasterpro.com/ to it. I also modified the plans for Stencil Fix to make it substantially bigger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am3ztQIkss0
So, I do a fair bit of both reflow and hand SMD soldering at this point, depending on what the situation calls for. It's great fun.
# Soldering iron
I'd recommend the Pinecil V2 with IronOS. https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS
# Solder fume extraction
I've built a simple fume extraction with an old plastic case, a 120mm fan and a sheet of carbon filter attached to a 120mm dryer / air conditioning hose. Around 15$ and good enough for soldering from time to time.
# "Microscope"
I simply use a strong (10x) magnifier glass with a LED ring (around 15$ on Amazon). I can't tell you how often I also used this thing for other purposes.
# Desoldering Pump
Because I needed it (beginners won't) I bought a ZD-8965 for 100 bucks and I'm very happy with this thing.
I have whole list of cheap beginner to intermediate equipment, that'll do until you solder (semi) professionally.
If you need a reflow oven, that's a different thing altogether, and you should probably repurpose an old toaster oven.
I delivered production boards (small run) that looked and worked great using a non-adjustable $10 30w iron (interchangeble tips, though) and a desklamp with the builtin magnifying glass.
You can't really tell the difference between a cheap setup and the expensive solder station I used in a previous employment.
"Can't tell the difference?" is not true, once you're dealing with small enough parts.
Can I use a magnifier to solder 0.4mm pitch parts? Sure. Would I prefer a binocular microscope? 100%, every time. Both usable, not the same.
Yeah, but that's the qualifier - "small enough parts". Go small enough and even an expensive iron isn't going to help you.
Effectively impossible without a stereo microscope.
I design and prototype devices for a living. I use a combination of reflow and hand soldering depending on which stage of the process I'm working through, and/or how much trouble I might be having with some aspect or another.
For example, there have been times where I've successfully dead-bugged QFN-24 to a PCB, allowing me to verify a fix and save myself several weeks and several hundred dollars.
All of these tools are only expensive in a vacuum. The moment you're relying on them to create products, and assuming you value your time correctly, you can see them for what they are: usually one-time fixed expenses that end up saving you thousands of dollars in board revisions that you never had to order.
Meanwhile, lots of people use cars as part of their job. Even a shit car costs many times what my soldering tools cost, and nobody would show up on HN to imply that they don't need a car.
Funny you mention that, because I just instructed someone how to solder for the first time and on probably their 4th joint they needed the desoldering pump because they added too much solder. I think it's easier to teach a beginner how to use a desoldering pump than how to use desoldering braid.
Too much or too little heat/time/solder/whatever? No worries; just move on to the next joint and try to get it a little bit better than the ones before.
This tends to mean working with practice materials instead of with real boards that actually have some future value, and that's quite OK. The practice has value in and of itself.
---
I can't imagine having to stop all forward progress and learn how to fix a thing after so few tries of something new.
We don't throw kids straight into the batting box and watch them strike out ("Sorry kid, maybe you can try again next weekend!"); we instead provide time and materials for them practice with first, let them make mistakes over and over again, and focus on encouraging the successes.
And then -- after enough practice that a good amount of familiarity is instilled -- they eventually get to go play a game of baseball.
Soldering should not be different in this way.
However, this is also something where it might pay of to buy a good one (ENGINEER SS-03) instead of a cheap knock-off in the long term.
I rarely desolder, but I can easily justify a hundred bucks if I can avoid all that hours of work, where I'm also risking damaging an IC, lifting a pad, or something else...
I went and bought the "proper" Hakko FR-301 and it's an improvement in every way. Well worth the extra $100, and made me wonder why I ever wasted my time with the cheap versions. For whatever reason, the 100V Japan voltage one is about $50 cheaper than the 120V American one, so that's the one I got, but I already happened to have a source of 100VAC handy.
The hakko is way better quality but beneath the price (i have no idea where you got one <300 bucks) there is another disadvantage: there is no Station and the hakko is heavy, so if you need to desolder for more than 30 mins I found it getting uncomfortable pretty quick.
Besides that the hakko is a good device. Too expensive for me though
https://www.amazon.com/Hakko-FR-301-Desoldering-Tool/dp/B07B...
I think the one I had was the ZD-917, which I don't even think anyone makes anymore. Assuming the ZD-8965 made some material improvements, it looks like it has the same style of reservoir with the internal spring, which is one of the main issues I had with it. I found that the spring would become eventually become trapped inside a large solder blob, making cleaning difficult. Then, you have to line up the filter and keep everything together while reinstalling it. For whatever reason, the tolerancing on mine made this especially difficult, and I eventually broke the glass tube when trying to reinstall it (replaced with an aluminium tube). Hakko version has no internal spring, and has enough tolerance to easily remove the reservoir.
The rubber grommet on the front also eventually lost its grip around the small brass tube that comes out from the iron, so it would leak and not suck as hard. The hakko version presses its grommet against a flat plate instead, so that doesn't happen.
Still, both are much better than the "squeeze bulb" style desoldering iron I had before them.
Small, silent and reliable for cheap money.
I did some minor mods and use these de-makeup cotton pads because they are cheaper but so far a great experience.
Another important note: don't go cheaper here. These manual desoldering pumps (<30 bucks) are pretty bad and the other zd-... Arent worth the money.
They even come with these compatibility wikis of what PSU or bank to buy.
In general, the danger with soldering fumes is not the average concentration in the room in which you're working over the duration of a session, it's inhaling the very high concentration of fumes right as the soldering happens.
We could debate how much damage this is going to do and whether it's worth worrying about, but there isn't really room to debate that ventilation alone is going to do absolutely nothing.
Well ventilated area + fan is probably okay, but you need the fan right next to your soldering iron or it needs to be a gigantic fan otherwise, again, you are just going to inhale most of those fumes.
They also contain a 120mm fans, a carbon filter and NO way to lead the fumes out oft the window.
However, you may be right that professional tools are the better choice in this case
I should have bought my Hakko fr301 way earlier than I did.
I can absolutely see how someone would hate soldering without good equipment.
A couple years back, I bought a low end no-name temp controlled iron, and it worked ok. A little better than the wood burner, but nothing great. Then about three years ago I bought a used Metcal SP200 Smartheat off of eBay for about $120. The tips are pricey (although Thermaltronics makes clone tips that cost less than genuine Metcal tips) but the difference in soldering performance is like night and day, even when one already knows how, but has just never used the really good systems.
Higher magnification variants (8x etc) are not nearly as comfy. They get quite long, heavy and expensive. I tried them and did not like them nearly as much. Also beware of short viewing distance, ultra-cheap products that are just a single lens element per eye.
Hopefully it'll bring my soldering to the next level.
Can you recommend something for "helping hands"?
https://hackaday.io/project/197868-sub-surface-simon
using no magnification, and only cheap soldering tools.
You can and should be able to solder SMD with only an iron and tweezers. Not everything; not the smallest stuff, but you don't start there. My sweet spot is 0805 or 0603 size components and 1.27mm pitch SOIC parts, which I actually find easier to solder than through hole, because you never have to flip the board over.
My recommendations for most useful tools are a Pinecil, a few packs of cheap flush cutters from Amazon (even expensive ones get dull or break), a cheap pair of sharp tweezers [1], and a tube of flux [2]. You don't always need extra flux if using flux-core solder, but enough flux can turn even the crappiest solder joints into good ones.
Most of the rest of the skill comes from being able to brace your hands against things to get fine control, while being far enough away to not burn yourself.
Magnification unfortunately comes down to how good your eyes are. If you can see your fingerprints clearly at arm's length, your vision is already good enough. If not, no big deal, get a cheap microscope like this one first [3], or a loupe, or some strong reading glasses, or one of those headband visor things with lenses in them.
[1] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/seeed-technology-...
[2] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/chip-quik-inc/SMD...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QB79SN
(for SMD).
I prefer my Hakko,
(and THD).
However, unless you're making simple circuits, avoiding SMD means that you are effectively constraining yourself to about 20% of the ICs being produced today.
It's also simply a fact that producing a product using THD components is a massive headache. It takes far more manual effort, most contract manufacturers will charge a pound of flesh, and the components are significantly bigger.
If none of those resemble problems you have to deal with, then THD is likely going to be great fun for you.
As I wrote about it in my comment, I started to list some tools that I have come to appreciate. I didn't even mention my pick and place or my CNC. Does it upset you that I have these, too?
Quite simply, you don't need to buy anything to practice this skill, but a stereo microscope is strongly recommended to anyone doing this multiple times a week.
People are so quick to get upset when they learn that other folks prioritize different things than they do.
The cheapest Hakko iron (888?) and a flat fine tip works great. I have a stereo microscope but I only use it for checking defects afterwards. A 10x magnifier works just fine.
Dios mio, what an absolute pain soldering is without something holding everything in place. It's literally a night and day purchase.
And thank you! I've been looking for a recommendation of a stereo microscope for a long time!
Edit: For a specific recommendation, look for the Geeboon TC22 on AliExpress or Amazon. Don’t forget the tips, you may need to get them separately.
Im a rank amateur so take what I said with a grain of salt. With that said, I have made several cool things in my life that many people've said I could charge money for. I guess you can't really see the mess I made when you can't look inside the housing :)
I've purchased it from the GEEBOON Store on Aliexpress (no affiliate or anything just looked up my order history):
https://geeboontools.aliexpress.com/store/1103439446
All being said you might not be comfortable with supporting the Chinese clone industry, and I can understand that.
(My bullshit detector is making some rather profound gurgling sounds.)
edit: Seriously, my dudes. Links, or it never happened. Anecdotes are just anecdotes. Anecdotally, my soldering iron heats up very quickly as well and I'm very pleased with this, but I'm not making a claim that it heats to an exact, unspecified user-selected temperature in 3 seconds. If you want to present a benchmark, then please present the bench -- with the mark.
Though from looking at some of the chatter about it online, this is only one specific tip they make under ideal conditions, and it seems like often they overshoot the temperature by more than a little on warmup (though this will be the slowest to recover with the tip just held in air as opposed to when actually soldering). Either way, I've used similar products and this kind of speed isn't a crazy suggestion to me.
My TS101 heats up in like 3-4 seconds (330c) on a 100W laptop PD USB C. It doesn't have a lot of mass but it's perfect for microcontroller related stuff. Just not power electronics.
Live demonstration: https://youtu.be/BepVEStPmJk
Metcal Fixed Temperature Induction soldering irons. Still the gold standard after decades because instead of using PID with a heating element and sensor, it exploits the curie effect. The tips are made of a special alloy that is only magnetic until a certain temperature after which it doesn’t absorb any more energy from the PSU, which just dumps a constant 25Mhz signal into the tip keeping it at the fixed temperature.
When their patents expired a couple of Metcal engineers left to found Thermaltronics, which makes the same soldering iron (they’re even tip compatible!) for 2-3x cheaper. They’re still more expensive than hobbyist soldering irons but well worth the cost for anyone doing a lot of soldering. The Metcal power supplies are beasts though so you can easily pick up a 20 year old unit for a couple hundred bucks on ebay and it’ll run till the apocalypse comes home to roost. I have an old unit made in the late 90s that is still going strong.
It has a 240W power supply, so it's not just marketing.
I have a Hakko FX-888D. It's pretty good, although I wish there was some way to switch tips that didn't involve letting it cool down to a safe handling temperature.
I am curious what you mean by rework tweezers. Link please!
Another link for folks: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B077BQWMTY
I go through these for solder flux removal like crazy, in combination with an aerosol can of MG Chemicals 4140-400G. Sadly, I think that stuff is unobtainium now.
Hakko FM2023-05 Mini Hot Tweezers Kit or Hakko FX8804-02 Hot Tweezer for Hakko FX-888 for example.
>> I wish there was some way to switch tips that didn't involve letting it cool down
I replace tips while hot: the sleeve is not hot.
There is a similar vibe with TIG welding as well.
But strength is important for bicycles. And aluminum bike frames are already built down to a given weight -- they don't have much in the way of extra strength to lend.
The heat of welding permanently changes the way the surrounding metal works. That's not ideal for safety devices like a bike.
Heat treatment can be done later (and is done when aluminum frames are built), but that's a different process to learn and it's pretty far beyond the gamut of what most welders are willing to deal with. Most welders don't have the bike-sized oven that's needed, let alone the training and experience to get it right, and with a sample size of exactly 1 it's a risky operation. It's easy to get things like warped tubes out of this process and turn a beautiful piece of wall art into scrap metal.
The biggest challenge I've had in welding aluminum as a hobbyist is that I rarely know what aluminum alloy I'm working with. Most things don't say what type so we're left guessing what filler is appropriate. If you use the wrong filler it could be prone to cracking again in the future.
Also for thicker aluminum preheating is very important. The aluminum transfers heat away very quickly so you get cold lumpy welds if you don't have both parts pretty hot at the start.
I don't know. I've got my station, not a bad one: bought it with the help of a buddy who's very good at soldering. He tried to show me. I've got no choice: I own an old vintage arcade cab from the mid 80s and it's located in the middle of nowhere, in a rural area. So I have to fix it myself.
And oh boy do I suck at it. I watched vids, countless Youtube vids. It's been 10 years and everytime I need to solder something, I still suck at it.
I've come to terms with the fact that there are some things I'm good at and that soldering is never ever going to be one of these. And it's okay.
And I'm amazed by people who can solder properly.
I have never used sandpaper on electronics, but I perhaps similarly use a fiberglass pen. Total game changer for getting old cartridge pins to read again for SNES and GBA games and such. Highly recommend picking one up.
I cannot stress enough that this is not a trivial detail. I spent my whole life thinking that I was simply terrible at soldering. Then I got a proper stereo microscope and now I feel like a freaking ninja.
Seriously, you do not know if you're bad at soldering until you've spent an hour with a proper STEREO microscope. All of the folks saying "just get a 10x magnifier loupe for $5" are completely missing the point.
If you give your brain a stereo view, you will suddenly be like Neo in the Matrix. Thank me later.
I used to watch people with fancy-looking soldering irons working quickly on stuff in repair shops. Some of that was technique ("it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools"), but some of it was definitely the irons they were using.
And yet: My first soldering experiences were not very good.
The first soldering irons I had, starting 30 years ago or so, were resolutely terrible. I eventually gained a whole assortment of them -- big, medium, small, and ginormous. They were all awful in their own unique ways, and they all lacked a thermostatic temperature control.
I got better solder (I've become a big fan of Kester 44 in a eutectic 63/37 mix) fairly early on, which helped a ton.
Later, I got better soldering irons.
A dozen years ago I bought a Hakko clone temperature-controlled soldering station from an American distributor. It took genuine Hakko tips just fine, and it was better.
5 or 6 years ago, I got a Pinecil v1. I now own two of them: I bought one as a spare in case one broke somehow (it's hard to fix a soldering iron without a soldering iron), but they've both been reliable. It's miles ahead of what I've used before. The v2 should be a bit better yet, but I do not own one of those. They're rather inexpensive.
These Pinecil irons weren't available a decade ago. I wish they had been.
---
Anyway: With the tools decently in-check, my technique got a lot better in a big hurry. I thought I'd learned to be pretty OK at soldering before with my lackluster tools, but the Pinecil iron (and its consistent temperature, sleep modes, and very quick heat-up) helps me get much better results -- faster.
And it's hackable, which (to me) scores some geek points.
---
I've come to think that anybody can learn to solder electronics with reasonable proficiency. I've taught people to solder who were sure they couldn't do it, including people who started off by being surprised by how hot the hot-bits are and walking them back from the ledge.
As with many other skills, it mostly just takes practice. But that practice should be inconsequential -- it's a lot easier to learn when the result is completely unimportant and inconsequential than on a dear 40-year-old arcade board.
To that end: There's ridiculously-inexpensive kits these days that primarily exist just to teach soldering. I learned through-hole the old-fashioned way (by failing), but back then cheap kits didn't exist at the level they do today. :)
If you can tell me more about the specific problems you're having with soldering, I can provide links to specific, specific soldering kits that may help.
(I can provide hands-on help, too, if you're not too far away. No big deal.)
Arcade cab would be located in France, on the french riviera, 45 minutes from the closest highway, in a sea-side but rural (lots of vineyards) area.
But I want to thank you very much for the explanation and offer to help!
Nothing in particular: typically it's the wiring around the joysticks and buttons that gives me the most trouble for the wire harness kinda "weighs" on it, then kid play like maniacs, and eventually a solder fails and has to be redone.
Now on the plus side I did buy a chinese JAMMA harness and did manage to solder everything but the result is fuglier than fugly: that's why I say I'm really bad at it. Basically I can do "gross" soldering, but not nice looking, precise ones.
I'll practice a bit though after the kind words from everybody.
So... joysticks, and buttons. Don't those have microswitches? With connectors on each switch?
Crimping the correct mating terminals can be more reliable than soldering. (Crimp-on connectors are what keeps airplanes up in the sky.)
Perhaps the right answer to soldering arcade controls is to stop soldering altogether. :)
Solder does have a big advantage, though, in that it is very universal. Any random copper wire can be glued onto any random terminal with molten metal, and that's pretty neat because it doesn't take any specialized parts or tools to make this work.
---
Anyway, I promised to help. For that kind of soldering, my usual workflow goes like something like this:
1. Cut off the end of the wire (for nice clean copper) and strip back the insulation a bit.
2. Heat up the iron and prep it (apply solder, wipe it off along with oxides, maybe apply more solder; it should be shiny and wet, but not with globs of stuff on it)
3. Tin the exposed copper wire. Heat it up while applying solder, until the solder flows through the strands freely. Too hot/too long means that a bunch of solder flows down past the insulation, which isn't ideal. Too cold/not long enough means that it kind of globs instead of flows. Perfect is somewhere in the middle. Set it aside to cool down.
4. Tin the terminal. Just heat it up with solder applied, until there's a neat little easily-flowing pool of it, and then let it cool down some. If the solder's flux core starts to burn, you're taking too long. If it blobs, it's not hot enough or not clean enough. Somewhere in the middle is, again, perfect.
5. Stick them together. Place the tinned wire on the tinned terminal so they "want" to rest together naturally (there's jigs that help with this kind of fixturing). And then, heat up the combination of the two with the iron. The solder that's mixed up with the wire will become one with the pool of solder on the terminal, and that's good. Often, there's no additional solder required for this step (but sometimes it's useful to add more). Again: Too hot and the solder flows away and the flux burns. Too cold, and it looks weird and instead of glassy. In the middle is good.
6. Remove heat. Don't move anything but the iron; just let the temperature drop until things turn solid.
Anyway, wire is easy to find. And a bag of cheap switches shouldn't cost too much. :)
---
Now, that said: I live in the States, where we never adopted RoHS. It's very simple for me to get solder with lead in it and that's the usual thing to see on any repair bench.
Lead-free solder is relatively unusual, and is not something I care to work with any more than I have to. I do not enjoy encountering it during repairs, mostly because it seems like it takes an astounding amount of heat to get it to do anything but laugh at me.
And really, for occasional hobbyist use, lead isn't a problem: Wash your hands afterwards, keep your work area clean, and don't let kids play with it. :)
What kind of solder are you using?
Over the last 30 years or so I have very (very) occasionaly soldered some basic stuff to build simple IoTs. Everytime this was (and is) a struggle (with a cheap equipment, no practice etc.)
And then someday I discovered on Youtube a video of someone resoldering some elements (chips, flat resistors, ...) using some kind of gel and a heat gun (?) and it was mermerizing. So clean, so fluid -- seriously a relaxing experience
Any modern or new stuff (i.e. the smallest components) has the whole supply chain designed around lead-free. Lead free boards, using lead free chips, which are meant to take the heating profiles for lead free solder. If working in industry, you'll need to learn lead free eventually, so you had better do it from the beginning.
I save my leaded solder for old radios and retrocomputing, but as I would rather not spread lead dust around my work area, I only ever use lead-free solder paste for modern work.
Leaded work is easier, a little, but not so much so that I wouldn't consider not learning lead-free.
Level 1 is just being able to take two wires and connect them, reliably and cleanly. That's already immensely useful and requires very little skill and equipment. $50 gets you a nice soldering pen, another $50 gets you some tweezers, some flux and a roll of solder and you're set. Work near an open window and have a desk fan blow the fumes away from you, and you're already being more responsible than most people.
Level 2 is something like through-hole soldering, soldering wires to pads, the kind of stuff you'd do working with ESP32, building RC cars, FPV drones or custom IoT devices. Still easy to learn, just a few simple rules. Work quickly, know when to give up and let things cool down. Avoid touching the expensive e-ink display with your soldering iron. Get something better for fume extraction, spend 10 hours soldering and bam, you're better at soldering than literally 99% people out there, you can build and repair all kinds of stuff. This is where most of the cool YouTube stuff happens, your rctestflight and Tom Stanton and Stuff Made Here and Styropyro. You can do most of that with $300-$800 worth of gear, depending on how brave you are.
And then you can worry about SMDs and reflowing and other arcane stuff, or decide that you probably won't need it.
A random frayed power cord, well, you can dump a ton of heat in it and start 6 times over and it won’t really matter. Worst case you replace some isolation or a warped connector.
Beyond the soldering iron, my recommendations that are not too obvious at first sight:
* solder paste (verrrry useful, just get it, and use it)
* something to purify air that _pulls_ it (a reverse fan) with a carbon filter (~30 USD)
* magnifying glass, hopefully attached to a ring of LEDs + a stand so you can see what you are doing (30-60 USD)
* solder sucker, hopefully automated (5 USD non-automated, 80 USD+ automated)
Proper order of operations:
(1) soldering iron to metal first to heat up the wire / pad / pin
(2) apply solder at junction of soldering iron and wire / pad / pin
(3) remove solder
(4) remove iron
And the most important basic tip is to make sure you have the appropriate soldering iron tip for the job. Pointy tips intended for precision work don't provide enough heat transfer for soldering larger pads or wires.
Everything is lead-free surface mount now. Solder paste, stencils, reflow ovens. Hand soldering is precision temperature controlled irons, hot air rework stations, magnifiers, cameras, and exhaust fans. The tools are more complicated, more expensive, and better.
One of the lessons of surface mount work is that you really can move your fingers a thousandth of an inch. But you need magnification to see what you're doing.
I'm encouraged to see more hobbyists going surface mount. In my TechShop days, I was the only one doing surface mount. Everybody else was using 1980s 0.1 inch spacing DIP components. That's a US thing. If you learn to solder in Shenzhen, you start with surface mount.
Leaded solder is easier to work with for personal projects. Careful hand washing and handling is required, but it's easy.
I also recommend people go to surface mount, but I don't recommend beginners immediately go for expensive microscopes and reflow ovens. Stick to 0806 components or larger to start and you can populate a board without any binocular microscope or magnification as long as your eyesight isn't too bad. I can populate 0402 components without magnification all day long.
For small boards, reflow on one of those cheap hot plates. They're small enough to back in the drawer when you're done.
Surface mount doesn't have to be hard or expensive, unless you're doing designs with ICs that come in very fine pitch packages.
it really isn't if you use a nice modern lead-free solder. you'll need your iron to be about 20c hotter, but it's not like the early days of lead-free where it'd flow all weird.
In general the formulation is more important than the brand, and the formulation isn't /that/ important either. If it's lead free, has a rosin core, and comes on a spool, you can probably use it.
Custom PCBs are even cheaper here than in North America, and longer workdays meant I had less time for hobbies. That probably made me double down on my choice.
I don't own much fancy equipment, just a cheap hot air rework station. I've found that mixing in fresh gel flux into my solder paste to get the right consistency made a big difference, enough that I never really needed more tools.
After doing that, I just sort of smear some near-ish the pads (perversely, often using a THT resistor), drop the parts in approximately the correct position with tweezers, and heat it up gently. Surface tension handles the rest. Once in a while, an 0402 resistor shifts out of position, but otherwise it just works. I'd probably need better tools for BGA.
What I love best is that SMT microcontrollers can be very, very cheap. I like the attiny10 (36$ for 100 computers! What a wonder!). There are plenty that are under 10 cents each, but I rather like AVR assembler, and their datasheets are very good.
[1] https://github.com/Hypfer/valetudo-dreameadapter
A lot of initial soldering mistakes are from using incorrect temperature, not cleaning the surfaces with flux, or from using wrong tips.
You do get better rather quickly, especially if you ask for help!
I mean, a smell is temporary unpleasant but what happened to my health here? I am a former smoker, so I guess damage was previously done there.
This specific iron is a portable one (I had it hooked up on a powerbank), with temperature control and FOSS firmware. It was lead-free soldering tin with flux included. I held the item with my hands, so maybe it did get greased by skin oil, who knows. I had a lot of help from other more experienced people. They guided me through it, with a lot of patience. Without them, I'd been stuck way before. But even they were like... maybe this isn't for you.
My motor skills are just not that good (possibly related to my ASD or father having MS), and I notice that with everything where I gotta use my hands. From elementary school handwriting (learning to write) or even before with tasks like eating, putting clothes on, etc. That is as far back as I can remember. Ever onwards, things like sports. I am simply physically clumsy, and it requires a lot of effort and practice to get on a decent level. Can I do it? Can I hand write? Yes, I can. But it requires a lot of practice to get to a decent level. I can satisfy my wife with my hands though, probably my most important skill I am grateful for. No joke, btw. Although the fact I can, say, give myself food (eat) is probably more important, survival wise.
The one skill I would love to be able to achieve throughout my life, would be programming, not soldering. I mean, something like soldering is awesome, I am a sucker for right to repair, second hand, reusable hardware, etc something like programming comes close to, say, Lego. Though programming wise I am not sure nowadays, given AI. And there too, I tried VB, TCL, C, Java, Python. Multiple Python courses, too, from MOOC, books, to a professional teacher in a classroom. I've been (and am) able to make small adjustments to code, and do some shell scripting (and mIRC scripting, but that was roughly 30 years ago). That's it. That is without AI, I haven't bothered with that. I like to run LLMs locally.
Flux core solder is crap. It doesn’t contain enough flux to begin with and since it’s inside the solder, it can’t actually do the work it’s supposed to. You need to apply flux separately before soldering, and lead-free solder used to be harder to work with. That’s the leading mistake I’ve seen frustrate beginners.
Steady hands aren’t a requirement unless you’re doing very complex repairs like threading wire through a BGA grid. You’re supposed to use the surface tension of the solder to snap the component’s pins to the PCB pads. After you snap two corners to the pads, you can just glide a tip with some solder over the rest of the pins and the heat and flux do the rest of the work (the flux’s main job is actually changing the solder’s surface tension to make this easier and more predictable).
I remember I was in college when I tried to solder some jump points on my xbox to enable me to mod it. I went in expecting electronics to look like what they did when I was growing up (I used to take everything apart, but I usually was able to put it back together). I open it up to find the jump points are smaller than grains of sand. It left me very much wanting some sort of mechanical aide to help. I occasionally watch videos of people repairing gpus or mbs and I cannot imagine how they do it.
Thermal mass is important, please have a look at my other post for a recommended tutorial set. Silver based solders like SAC305 will also stick to most plated pin types.
Sometimes people are given a BS fools errand, and convince themselves there is some hidden secret to workmanship. You would have been better off with a $25 30W Weller iron and $7 flux+Wick kit off Amazon for through-hole style PCB kits. =3
I paid like 40€ last week for 5 smaller PCBAs, 0402s all nice and correct, jumpers, all my ICs. Don't have to worry about diode orientation or solder bridges. Just complete boards shipped to me. Easily beats my own labour rates.
The annoying part is getting the bom and component placement files correct. I use kicad since it's free, and there's solid instructions from most houses on what they need.
There's also a suspicion that JLBPCB may be encouraged to do this by the Party, to discourage other countries from maintaining an independent prototyping capability.
But yeah, everything's smd now and stencils and PCBs are cheap enough there is little reson to not go that way
Use this, stop complaining: https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/07/29/pinecil-v2-soldering...
Pinecil RISC-V soldering iron with the Pinecil V2 featuring a new Bouffalo Lab BL706 RISC-V microcontroller with Bluetooth LE connectivity, optimizations for higher power levels, as well as tentative support for the new USB PD EPR standard (Extended Power Range) working at up to 28V.
Of course a lot of electronics were compliant before 2006, but that point in time marked the moment when even the most suspicious dropshipped Chinese items had to use it and suddenly you needed way more heat to do the same things.
It runs IronOS - Open Source Flexible Firmware for Soldering Hardware
https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS
It's OK to have fun with tools.
When I first tried my hand at soldering I was using the "butter knife" method: apply solder to the iron, then try to smear it onto the wire like spreading butter with a butter knife. Of course the solder would never stick to where I wanted it to go. I had to learn that solder goes to where the heat is, so I instead had to heat the components or wires instead and then feed the solder onto the hot components. I also had to learn that a soldering iron is not a pencil, sometimes even when doing small parts you want to use the large tip. Don't try to tell the solder where to go, instead apply a big blog and watch it snap into place on its own.
Last year I installed an HDMI mod[1] into my Wii, this has been so far the hardest project. It took me many attempts to get it right, mainly because I was working against the solder instead of with it. But now that I have succeeded I could easily do it over and over again (not keen on the disassembly and reassembly of the console though).
EDIT: while I'm at it I might as well mention the iron I was using: the Pinecil[2]. It's a really neat and fast soldering iron at a very cheap price. Great for people like me who don't want hardware store cheap garbage, but also cannot justify buying an entire soldering station.
[1] https://electron-shepherd.com/collections/kits-mods/products... [2] https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-solde...
Switching from a Weller to a Pinecil was also pretty nice although I'm sure everything I do, I could do with my analog weller.
It (a good proper flux) is what most people are missing when they struggle with SMD, the flux makes the solder almost magnetic and it jumps perfectly to the pad and the component. Mess up, make a bridge or bad connection? Add more and wave the tip through like a magic wand. Poof. Fixed.
Thanks for coming to my Church of Flux presentation.
Still wash your hands after using lead-free solder by the way. You don't want to be eating rosin or copper either.
And copper plumbing is super common for potable water?
And plenty of spirits are distilled in copper stills?
I mean, encouraging handwashing is fine but copper isn't what you need to worry about.
Also apparently the word solder comes from Middle English 'soudure' which doesn't even have an L in it.
My 50Euro hardware store solder iron was garbage. Bought one of these pencil type solders for 100 Euro years later and that small thing was 10x better than the heavey shitty hardware store solder iron.
I'm sure a good station makes it even nicer but if your normal iron doesn't get hot fast and doesn't keep it properly hot, you can play lots of guessing games why your stuff doesn't do what that person on youtube is showing you how it should work
Unleaded solder and a decent fume extractor make the process cleaner. A decent soldering iron and solder wire with good-quality flux (e.g. Kester) makes it faster.
If you'd rather not deal with the iron, you can manually apply solder paste and use a hot air rework tool or even a heat gun (careful!) to melt it. (A proper reflow oven is better, of course, but that's pricey.) This makes working with surface-mount components much easier.
If you'd rather not deal with it at all, have a PCB assembled somewhere else. JLC is pretty cheap, especially on simpler boards.
You can do a lot worse than a $55 temperature controlled hot plate. Plus you can watch the magic happen. Of course that only works for single sided boards. I've been very impressed with the results.
https://www.amazon.com/Soiiw-Microcomputer-Soldering-Preheat...
But my first day there, after dusting and throwing cardboard, he asked me "Hey kid, wanna learn on how to solder?" and we spent a good hour going through the basics. That sparked my interest in electronics, and put me on my path the electrical engineering.
I still do a lot of soldering, as I build guitars, and repair audio equipment. I enjoy the tranquility soldering gives me...the things that usually suck, is not the soldering itself, but the environment you work in. You don't always get the circuit boards out. Sometimes you're working in a rats nest. Sometimes you don't helping hands.
If you're impatient, plenty of fab houses (like JLCPCB) will do all the soldering for you, for about 0.1 cents per SMD joint or 2 cents per THT joint...
As long as you are not directly inhaling in the flux smoke while hovering over the project, it's not that unhealthy. If you are a hobbyist doing an hour of soldering a week, you probably get more smoke particle inhalation making toast. Or pizza. Or frying literally anything.
(If I was soldering for a living, yes I'd want a really good fume extractor on the bench, though.)
Isopropyl alcohol removes all the soldering residue. Personally, all it took is decent equipment and some practice to make soldering enjoyable. It can be frustrating at times, but usually the problem is (lack of) heat, flux or patience.
You can not suddenly be able to replace your PS5 HDMI port if you've never soldered before. Also you need the right tool, a $20 solder is never enough.
Soldering is a skill, you need to practice.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieren_photography [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Air
(as of 11:10pm PST 2026-05-11, I hasten to add)
It was a true splurge, but I love it. Warm-up in 15 seconds, and the tips are integrated with the heaters so there's no thermal contact to worry about. Tiny and big tips both work great. You can change tips while they're hot.
At home I have a typical Weller station, and it's OK for the electronics side business that I run, but nothing like that Hakko.
... and I love soldering.
There is no such thing as "too much flux" (Actually there is, when doing BGA reflow, but that's advance topic)
Connectors tho... PITA
https://youtu.be/0LSG5uIdqJc?t=190s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUyetZ5RtPs&t=40s
Soldering with an iron:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvl_KYif9zA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RXugDd0xik
Drag soldering with a hoof tip iron:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUyetZ5RtPs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyele3CIs-U
Hot air techniques (mid size QFN, soic, and other SMD):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v58m-S35s24
Recommended equipment:
WE1010EDU for fine and medium work (remember the 3 second fillet rule)
https://www.amazon.com/Weller-WE1010EDU-Soldering-Education-...
A set of hoof and screwdriver tips:
https://www.amazon.com/Genuine-Weller-WE1010-Soldering-ETSET...
Flux and solder wick for cleaning pad areas on PCB:
https://www.amazon.com/Lesnow-Desoldering-Electronics-Disass...
CREWORKS 858D cheap hot air tool for basic SMD rework:
https://www.amazon.com/CO-Z-Soldering-Temperature-Desolderin...
1. never use metal wool to clean the iron tip coating
2. Before use, clean by dragging a hot iron across water dampened sponge (or paper) to smear off oxidized material.
3. Never use Bismuth solder, it was invented by fools for fools. Also, indium contamination can make you go bald.
4. Your iron should choose one (and only one) of the following
i. Sn63/Pb37 No-Clean eutectic solder for low temperature industrial machinery
ii. RoHS compliant SAC305 Lead-Free No-Clean Solder
5. No Clean means the flux core in the solder may be left on the work. However, it is recommended to clean it off with 99% IPA.
6. Fume extraction blows crud outdoors, and charcoal filters just makes crud smell nice.
7. Practice PCB kits are cheap, and getting 2 in case you cook something by inserting it backwards may be wise.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/soldered-electron...
Best of luck =3
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/brass-sponge-has-rui...
Anecdotally, all wool seems to accumulate abrasive crud, various amalgamated solder waste, melted plastics, and trimmed bits of steel etc.
Best of luck =3
The stuff that came with my (apparently genuine) Hakko 599B is non-ferrous (and is therefore not steel). Refills are Hakko part 599-029.
Soldering iron tips are usually made from copper with a thick iron plating. On Moh's hardness scale, iron doesn't care much about what brass thinks. :)
In situations where PCB ground pours removed thermal-reliefs for power handling reasons, mini-cartridge-heaters often simply don't have enough thermal mass to heat an area fast enough without the control-loop missing temperature ranges and or time limits.
Anecdotally, same reason good portable butane catalytic iron units are often superior to USB-C/battery operated units.
Note Zinc contact is restricted in some places, and that ban includes zinc-brass sources. Best of luck =3
But then I had a hardware startup and learnt something about myself.
I enjoy building one or two of something. I absolutely hate building anything more than that.
I've gotten to 56 without knowing how. It's unclear if that will change now.
Hacked the physical: pentastic!
Got the pump-wickin' stickin',
Who didn't turn off the bench?
Where's the 100x lens Gibson?
IC damage and bits of French
Master fine STM RPI ATM 329
Fuckin' A to the Zed
Fill your lungs with lead
Y'all shit's funded by
Venture rebrands for A&I.
Honestly 90% as good as my genuine JBC CDB and only costs something like $65 USD.