Soldering: if a pre-teen can do it

Tech Talk
1

Thanks for giving the gumption to look up soldering technique.

First the level of soldering I’ll need is ambulatory or first aid/ paramedic level. I don’t have the gumption to create completely from scratch. I just want adequate enough for fixing loose connections and do it asap and save money by not shipping to a repair shop and back. And the only thing I"ll) do is band aid loose connections.

Watching 3 videos. The things you need are iron (PS is there a difference between an iron and gun?), A soldering bond material, a metal or typical dishwashing sponge (with absorbed water) a “wick” which is also an excess remover, an exhaust absorber, and since I’m klutzier than average, helping hands (unless you’re Goro :wink: )

Questions

  1. When in doubt, raise temperature and lower time is the most common advice. But typical time and temp for resoldering wire in a pin of a db37?

  2. If I’m just doing ambulatory, is “as cheap as p
    possible” good general advice, or else what specific things are worth splurging on? (Like exhaust absorber?)

  3. Safety tip #1 never touch ANY metal once the possibility of heat is there. I assume there is a sign that solder is cool enough to touch and let go of wire. What is it?

Safety tip #2 never touch iron’s metal portion with hands.

Safety tip #3 allow enough warm up and cool down time and always work with exhaust absorber.

I see many videos for more specific techniques. But most of the videos assume you’re doing WAY more than ambulatory work. Which iron tip and technique for wire to pin soldering of a typical joystick wire maintanence I’m planning to do Monday?

2

Just take your time, use flux, and get some practice. Soldering is not about precision.

Here Ben Heck shows you dont need to have precision to get even fine pitch soldering

1 Like
3

Also if you get a solder bridge, dont panic ether dry your iron of solder or use solder braid

It’s easier to recover from a solder bridge than it is to prevent bridges.

Only mistake that’s hard to fix is lifting pads off the board

4

Maybe i’m a soldering scrub(probably). My technique?

Heat up Solder gun to max temp, melt tiny bit of solder on the end. For some crazy reason, melted solder doesn’t want to merely “drop” off the tip when you go to move your iron after. It just hangs dangling on the end of the tip, in it’s liquid state, like a big raindrop. I’m not an astrophysicist so i can’t explain this crap, it just does.

And i touch it to the spot i need the solder to go. Viola!

Did a complete Solder job like this back in the day. I had an Arcade Heart PS2 Hori Arcade stick that i wanted to mod with full-sanwa controls. The buttons unfortunately, were the dreaded “button-soldered-to-PCB” style. So i had to first Unsolder the stock buttons from the PCB, then cut & strip New wire, and solder it to the areas the buttons were at. So i could then strip & crimp Quick-disconnects on the other end to attach to my new Sanwa buttons.

Despite my flawed soldering technique, this went off Perfectly and the connections held Strong until the day i eventually sold the stick on e-bay.