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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
>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 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 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 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 engineers went and founded 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
---
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.)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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...
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.)
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.
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. :)
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
Starting with soldering, I find these 200$+ recommendations (regardless of which tool) hard to justify.
# 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.
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.
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
I'd love agree with you... Unfortunately I bought some <50 bucks solder fume extractors and I'm pretty confident to say they don't work reliably.
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
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.
Understatement.
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...
might be worth trying a cheap solder sucker pen if you havent (the mechanical recoil type), significantly better than nothing
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.
They rely on compliant power sources, so just make sure you don't use bad ones that only pretend to follow the spec.
I'll steal your ZD-8965 recommendation :) Thanks!
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.
This is a great tip, I use a loupe and it works amazingly well. Cost maybe $10?
Oh yeah, I'm sure that $300 microscope comes in handy but a cheap loupe gets you started. I've found all sorts of other uses for it too.
Not just those things but the biggest helper of all: a set of helping hands.
Dios mio, what an absolute pain soldering is without something holding everything in place. It's literally a night and day purchase.
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.
Me too I love soldering. And actually, it's one of the few things that I like more and more, as I realize I've developed a real craftmanship from it.
And thank you! I've been looking for a recommendation of a stereo microscope for a long time!
>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.
There is a similar vibe with TIG welding as well.
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.
It’s quite easy to not burn yourself. I’ve done a fair bit of soldering and it has only happened like twice to me and it wasn’t that bad
Agreed on stereo microscope, also suggest flux and a good iron with exchangeable tips and hot tweezers (I enjoy the Hakko).
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.
Share a link! Don't be shy.
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):
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.
any c245 will do (JBC is the best and original, but clones are close)
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.
This is what JBC's marketing claims: https://www.jbctools.com/top10.html
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.
Depends on mass/element power.
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 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 engineers went and founded 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 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.
Yup. They specify 3 seconds, but that's for 350C. In my experience, it's always at the right temperature by the time I finish picking it up.
It has a 240W power supply, so it's not just marketing.
I can't imagine not using flux!
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.
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 am curious what you mean by rework tweezers. Link please!
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.
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.
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.
Step 1: Have a workshop space Step 2: ? Step 3: Profit
> 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.
And I'm amazed by people who can solder properly.
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.
A glass fiber pen is my go-to for cleaning groddy pads and pins and the like. Works a treat.
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.
---
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.)
just don't use leaded solder. the absolute obsession of people from NA and lead should be studied.
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.
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)
* solder sucker, hopefully automated (5 USD non-automated, 80 USD+ automated)
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).
Well, you’re saying that after you already learned how to do it.
He's soldering like it's fifty years ago.
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.
> Everything is lead-free
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.
Do you have a brand recommendation ? Leaded solder is unavailable in my country
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.
The only place I've noticed a difference is for very large components with a lot of thermal mass.
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.
[1] https://github.com/Hypfer/valetudo-dreameadapter
Try rosin flux, it smells actually pleasant!
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 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.
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.
Where did you buy your populated boards from? I want to make a small in and not deal with SMT at all.
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.
Ah, really interesting points, thanks. It definitely seems too cheap to be true.
lead solder is so much better tho.
But yeah, everything's smd now and stencils and PCBs are cheap enough there is little reson to not go that way
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://electron-shepherd.com/collections/kits-mods/products... [2] https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-solde...
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.
For sure. If you watch x device repair videos they tend to flood the general area with flux and it works to great effect.
I do the same. Flood and get the joints perfect, then clean with either IPA or a can of flux off.
And don't ever think the flux core within the solder will be enough.
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.
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"
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Soiiw-Microcomputer-Soldering-Preheat...
Yes, you are quite correct in the first point. I've also met people who recommend crimping where possible as a safer and cleaner solution.
Some nice Schlieren photography on show here too [0]. Also seen on John Martyn's Solid Air [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieren_photography [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Air
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...
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...
Nice iron,a good clamping set-up, and a high-quality correctly specked (to the task) solder make all the difference
I enjoy soldering, and like your comparisons. Yet I certainly don't blame the author for highlighting how unhealthy it is.
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.)
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.
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. :)
Of all the threads to not have a single bad comment!
(as of 11:10pm PST 2026-05-11, I hasten to add)
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 ;-)
Soldering was my favorite part of ee course in the university… i even kinda liked the fume..
Any tips on how to improve soldering? I just started learning electronics, it’s so fun with Claude doing the code for the device.
So get yourself a solder fume extractor? There's plenty cheap ones to pick from.
Whatever happened to wire wrapping? That used to be a viable alternative.
It only works for thru-hole parts and the special wire-wrap sockets you needed to do it properly got expensive (and are no longer in production).
I have used wire wrapping, and it's a good alternative to through-hole, but SMD is just miles better
As long as it isn't soldering connectors, I like it.
Connectors tho... PITA
Watching skillful SMT soldering on YouTube fascinates me in a way that helps me understand the ASMR videos that the kids watch these days.
Recommendations?
No particular channels or videos come to mind, but here are a couple good ones (with timestamps to skip the intro fluff):
https://youtu.be/0LSG5uIdqJc?t=190s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUyetZ5RtPs&t=40s
I would not call 2nd video "skillful", that SOIC was molested, not soldered :(
Fair enough, perhaps I'm easily impressed. :)
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.
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
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.
... and I love soldering.
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.
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.
It probably varies; some people are allegic to rosin, some develop an allergy from long-term exposure, and others seem to effectively be immune to it.
Yeah I grew up with it too. Also the smell of cigarettes and coffee typical of so many communist government offices brings back pleasant memories.
lead-free solder fluxes tho... they are fucking vile stench
Anti-Schematic fantastic
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.
Nice poem.