Beginner's Guide to Soldering Electronics Part 1

this is a beginner's guide to soldering electronics so if you are thinking about giving soldering a try or if you've had a go at it and you're not very happy with the results you're getting then this video is for you I'm gonna be going over all the equipment that you're going to need such as soldering iron solder and flux and the important roles of all of these items I'm also going to be going through some soldering techniques to ensure that you get neat clean joints every time I think I want to mention is the pronunciation of the words solder some parts of the world say solder some parts of the world say solder there is an argument to be made for each of those pronunciations based on the word etymology but at the end of the day as long as we all know we're talking about the same thing it doesn't really matter a basic principle of any kind of soldering is Dabangg two things together using solder as the glue that soldering electronics has the added requirement that that join needs to be electrically conductive so looking at the equipment requirements are you going to need a soldering iron now they come in a variety of different shapes and sizes and prices you can get ones for just a few dollars and you can spend thousands on a soldering iron the cheaper type generally have the mains power cable coming right out the back of the soldering iron they generally don't have any sort of temperature control and if you're lucky with those cheap ones you might have a replaceable tip the next step up from those is to go with a soldering station which generally has a base station with a temperature control and then the iron is connected to that base station and soldering stations usually have replaceable tips as well and some of the better ones you might have a reasonable range of different types of tips as well my recommendation for for this sort of work is to go with a soldering station I mean they're a little bit more expensive than the basic soldering IDE but you can get them for quite cheap and it's much better to have that that temperature control on the soldering station and as I say you generally you've probably going to end up with of you know better quality and finer tips on a on a soldering station as well now I use a hakko fx-888 retail for around about five hundred dollars here in Australia but I'm pretty sure you can get them for under 300 in the US they have the absolute worst interface but the thing I really like about them is that you can actually remove the tips in the middle of soldering so if we have a look here I can actually lift that out and remove that tip even when it's hot the difference with this soldering station is that the whole tip is the actual heater whereas some of the cheaper soldering stations the heater is in the handle and then you just have a small bit of you have the tip which just sits in the top of that heater and the the heater transfers the heat to that tip now because these actually have the heater in the tip itself that's been much more effective heat transfer but it's only this end bit that gets hot the base stays cool and so you can't actually swap these out while you're in the middle of a soldering job and and I generally use use only sort of three tips when I'm soldering and they're just three different sizes of beveled edge tip and I generally don't really like the conical tips which is that pointed put the pointed type which is a shame because most soldering stations come with a conical tip as standard and some of them only have the option for a conical tip there's no bevel tips even available for them so this is one of the things I really like about the the HECO station there are a huge range of tips available now even though the hakko is the soldering station I use everyday I'm not going to be using it for this demonstration I am going to be using this POS soldering station that I picked up from my local electronics retailer for 2995 and the reason I'm going to be using this is because I want to demonstrate that it is more about technique than it is about the equipment that you're using now I've never used this soldering station before in fact I've never even taken out of the box so it could be very interesting so when it comes to the temperature I use for my soldering station I generally set it at around about 400 degrees Celsius which is about 750 degrees Fahrenheit now the melting point of leaded solder is about 180 degrees Celsius so 400 might seem a little bit high but the thing is that I'm not just looking to melt the solder I'm wanting to be able to transfer the heat from the soldering on to whatever it is that I'm soldering so that's why I have that temperature a bit higher if I was working with lead-free solder I'd probably be looking at about 450 degrees C or 850 degrees Fahrenheit I'm not super fussy about it near enough is good enough for me okay so I've got my little soldering station all set up isn't it cute it's got a tiny weeny little tip on the end of it we'll see how it all goes so the next thing I'm going to do is go over solder and flux and the relationship between the two so I'm just going to flick over to the microscope here and if we look through here I've got a piece of solder here this is from a just a roll of solar and and if you have a look here if I just grab a scalpel and ice this through the middle you'll see when we open it up that inside there it's gonna zoom in on that a little there is a little channel of flux inside there and so there is actually flux inside this solder that's the flux there and that just got it gives you an indication of just how important flux is in the process of soldering the fact that the solder actually has flux in it now the purpose of flux is basically to help with the with stopping the oxidization process or oxidation process depending on which part of the world you're from is how you pronounce it so any sort of medal I mean you'd be familiar with obviously when metal rusts that's the process of that oxidizing and solder oxidizes as well and I can actually demonstrate that here I'm going to grab my soldering iron and I'm going to just let me zoom out here a bit I'm going to melt some solder on to the iron just like this okay so there's a nice shiny metallic blob of solder there it is there now we let that sit I was going to grab a pair of tweezers here longer we let that sit it will start to get this conic crust on the outside you can see there's a bit of a film as we move it around it's sort of you can see all these we're getting all these really ugly shapes on top of it at the moment here and this is all part of that process of oxidizing as the oxygen reacts with that metal you start to get this film on the outside then all of a sudden that solder is very hard to work with it's not going to do what you want because in order for solder to adhere to whatever you're wanting to solder the both surfaces need to be you know really really clean and and that includes sort of making sure they're not oxidized so flux basically helps yeah in that in that process by stopping the oxidization of that metal on the soldering iron or on whatever you're soldering to sort of that solder will then adhere much easier now I'm going to get back to that a little bit in a little moment because I'm just going to demonstrate that for that process to you but I just want to talk about solders and flux so this here either the solders basically come in two different varieties and that's Leonard and lead-free now this is actually a leaded solder it's 60% 10 and 40% lead obviously as we know lead is a very poisonous substance so it's better to what to not actually have lead now having said that the leaded solder has a slightly lower melting temperature so it can actually be a little bit easier to work with and that's one of the reasons why I do tend to work with leaded solder though I am trying to win myself off it so if you are going to be using leaded solder it's very important that you have lots of really good ventilation I've got a little sort of air filter it's it's not the best sort of air filter it's better than nothing but one of the things I tend to do is what I'm working I've got a fan here behind me and I just switched that on so there's here blowing from behind me and it's just you know blowing any of those fumes away from me this workshop that I'm in has actually got pretty good ventilation so so yes so just obviously keeping in mind that if you are going to be using leaded solar it is poisonous stuff if you're going to be using lead-free solder you have to keep in mind that it has a higher melting point so your soldering stations gonna need to I have a little bit more at a higher temperature in order to melt the solder so now the next thing is flux and again fluxes come in a couple of varieties as well they generally come in active and passive varieties active solid this is an active flux here this one is is called baker's soldering fluid and the reasons for it - as activities it is acidic it's it's corrosive and so it is actually taking a layer off the the metals that you're using when you're soldering but the downside is that if you don't clean this off it keeps corroding and so you if you're working with this with electronics you can come back you know a week later and find that it's eaten through all of the wires and then you know sort of and then it's not gonna be good at all so I would i would recommend staying away from this for electronics once upon a time I didn't realize that anything but this existed and this is all I used but there are lots and lots of different types of flux out there so another thought you might find is something like this which is a rosin flux and this is a passive flux and what that means is it's not corrosive in the same way that that that the active is and so you you if you leave it on whatever you're soldering it's not going to eat through the components it's still not bad not a bad idea to clean this stuff off after using it and of course again this stuff like all other things in this hobby is poisonous so just you know you've got to be careful make sure you wash your hands or use protection or whatever other different types of sold of flux you've got this is one that I use regularly it's Ametek NC 5 v 9 v 2 TF and it is another of the passive type fluxes and it's a gel and again this is one that you don't actually have to clean off after using it's not you know sort of a non corrosive and I say this is the one that I prefer to use but it's a little bit more expensive so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to grab just a little breadboard this is a breadboard here it's just sort of a board for sort of prototyping in electronics and if we have a look at it under the microscope you'll see that it is lots and lots and lots of little holes with little circles of little rings of copper and those rings of copper are for solder to adhere to now what I'm going to just demonstrate here I'm gonna just grab a great big blob of solder bigger is I gonna carry on this little soldering on something like that and then I am going to run it across some of these holes here now what you can see is that that solder is kind of congealing it's not flowing particularly well and we're you know ending up with this pretty revolting sort of shape and you might think well why on earth you're doing that anyway well I want to show you the difference of doing this when we're using some flux so I'm now going to grab some flux I'm gonna grab move up to a nice clean set of holes here yeah and I'm gonna put a great big mess a mess of this flux on these holes heaps in hopes and hopes and the reason I'm using so much is because I do want to demonstrate this point I'm now gonna grab there's a wrong sobbing I'm sorry I'm gonna grab a whole stack of solder like this onto the end of the soldering iron and I'm now going to do the same thing I did last time I'm gonna run them across here and what you can see you can see what happens here when I'm using that flux we've ended up with a row of really nice neat little blobs rather than this kind of smeary mess that I ended up with before and obviously those blobs are much neater and tidier now I'm not necessarily saying that you do what I just did using loads and loads and loads of flux and nothing else but it does demonstrate to you what a difference it makes when using flux when you're soldering because of the way it halts that oxidization and helps that you know that solder flow and form into nice little you know nice little blobs rather than sort of some big streaky mess alright so the next thing I want to talk about ears are the maintenance of your soldering iron and the main thing is to make sure the tip is kept clean now some people use sponges with water but what I would recommend is something like this it's it's a little sort of little container that's filled with like a steel wool and you basically get your soldering iron tip and you just stab it into that little mesh of of metal and that will clean that tip off or get rid of any excess solder and it will just keep that tip looking nice and clean so that's that's my recommendation is to use one of these you can actually get replacements for these when they get old and tatty you just whip that out chuck it in the bin and put a new one in so that's basically what I use for keeping my soldering iron tip clean and tidy the other thing I just wanted to mention quickly was something that I'm going to be using in this next bit which is heat shrink and heat shrink is basically just a tall choose of plastic that they come in a range of different sizes and colors and you you use this to seal up any joins that you might do so that you can you can if rather than leaving any sort of exposed joins when you're joining up wires the heat shrink covers that which means that the joins are going to last a lot longer this stuff you can just buy it electronic retailers you can buy this stuff on eBay super cheap and as I say and this is a box with just a whole a whole bunch of different sizes which has lasted me a very long time I have to say so what I'm going to do now is I'm actually going to join a wire together so this is a wire that has come and you know has been cut apart and I'm just going to jump across here to the to the microscope you can see it's a really really ugly cut that's happen here and we want to repair that and join them together now for what I'm going to be doing here I'm going to be using one of these which is a little articulated holder that bends around and has ittle alligator clips on it that allow you to you know hold your whatever you're working with in in a nice steady position because often often when you're soldering you've got one hand on the on the soldering iron you've got one hand on your solder and then you run out of hands for holding what it is you actually want to work on so that's where things like these these holders come in handy you can also have if you're working on circuit boards they're also things like this like a little rotisserie that allow you to put the board inside and then you can stand it on there and you can spin the board around for working on it and hold it all nice and still so they're quite handy as well that is depending on the work that you're you're going to be doing so the first thing I'm going to do with this this wire is I am going to clean up clean up these cuts because they are revolting so I'm just going to cut that in bit off and I get this one and I will cut that in bit off alright so now we've got two nice clean ends and then I'm going to be using a wire stripper like this one here just a really really basic one that just allows me to put this into the right sized hole that's a alike one there and then just strip the wire off so let me go there the wire strip there let's do the same for the other one strip that wire off okay yeah I'm just going to just give the the wire a bit of a twist like this so just holds those little little bits of why the little pieces of wire together there okay so now I want to join these two wires together now you might just say okay we'll put those two wires together and dump some solder on them that's generally not what I do when I'm when I'm soldering items like this what I like to do first is I like to get solder on the two things that I'm planning to join and then I melt them together so let's start off with that I'm gonna just put this wire into the holder and I am going to there we go nice and in focus I'm then going to get some solder on to this wire alright now here's one of the the most important parts of the technique and this is the mistake that a lot of people make when they're first starting out with soldiering and the mistake they make is they melt the solder on to the tip and then they try and transfer that solder onto the wire that is absolutely not the way to do it what you need to do and this is this is where that flux that's inside the solder is really important because that flux that's inside a solder only works at the time that it's melting so once you melt it on to your tip that fluxes it's done its thing and it's not of no use to you anymore so you actually need to make sure what that flux is being used when the solder is melting so what you need to do the correct procedure is to use the soldering iron to get the wire hot so this is you're using the actual soldering iron to get the wire hot rather than melting the solder let me just clean this tip a little bit it looks a little bit ugly okay so I'm gonna put him on there and then what you do is you use the solder then melt the solder onto the wire not onto the tip as you can see that burning that smoke coming off that is actually the flux and that's showing you that that flux is doing its job and so as you can see now that why is completely coated with solder even if it is a little bit out of focus it's completely coated with solder and that's ready for us to do a join so let's go through and do that one again with the other wire so let's grab this second wire here and again just let's get that little nice and in focus as best as we can once again soldering on goes to the wire gets the wire tries to get the higher wire as hot as possible and then melt the solder on to the wire there we go and then any excess that you end up with on the tip you just got to clean that away with your with your little love tip clean up Misha tip cleaner there so now we've got two pieces of wire that have both got solder on them so the next thing I'm going to do now is well actually they're ready for joining but if we were this is just one piece of this is a piece of wire that's not attached to anything for the purpose of this demonstration but imagine for a second that it was attached to something at each end so the next thing we would do is we would prepare by getting our heat shrink ready to go because once it's joined if it's attached at both ends you can't get that heat shrink on so what we do is we grab a little bit of heat shrink now get a size you want a size that is as close to the thicknesses of the wire as possible so if we just go under here so this one is quite good actually no this one's a little bit look it's it's a very snug fit this one I I think it would probably be okay but I would rather actually go with a size maybe one size up from that just to make a little bit easier for that to move around on the wire so let's try this one so this is an excise up and you can see that one fits quite well there okay so I'm just going to cut off a little bit of this I don't need the whole thing that's all bit too long I want a piece that is about the length of this join plus the same amount on either side so that's the joins going to be about that big and then so if we go that same amount on either side I'm probably going to be looking at I'd say it doesn't have to be precise but I'm gonna go with a length say about an inch in length or about maybe sort of two and a half three centimeters so there's a piece of there's a little piece of a good piece of heat shrink there and then what you do is you slip that over one of the pieces of what I doesn't matter which one but you just got to make sure you keep it reasonably far away from the joint itself because when this wire gets hot if it makes that heat shrink melt it will shrink prematurely which we don't want okay so I'm gonna now put the wire just over said I'm gonna put the wire into this holder I'm going to use both sides of this holder of these alligator clips so that I can hold both of these in position for soldering now you may sort of not want to use you know sort of have both in the holder you might just want one but for what I'm demonstrating here I am going to put them both in the holder I'll have to spin it around here we have two wires ready for joining they're both got some solder on them so I don't really need any more solder but if I wanted to I could just grab some here at the same time to melt them and then I've grabbed the wrong soldering iron again let's try this one and then we apply the heat to the area and then just melt those two together there we go look at that okay so obviously making sure that it cools don't pull them apart too early otherwise the the solder won't is cooled but here you can see that that's cooled and it's solidified and we've now got a nice neat and tidy join there and you'll find that that joint is probably stronger than the wire itself if I was to actually grab those and pull them apart it would probably break somewhere else before it broke at that joint okay so the next thing to do is to apply that heat shrink so I've got my I've got my jaw in here let me just Pat gotta join and then I've got the heat shrink over the top now let's jump across now I think it'll be easy to look at this camera for this so that's the join there and that's it there now when it comes to shrinking the heat shrink you can do it any number of ways I sometimes use a hot air rework station it blows out hot air or you can use a hot air gun but you can just use a little bit lighter if you want so if I just grab this just gently run the heat backwards and forwards over there you can actually see that that is making that shrink that heat shrink shrink down it's also getting a whole stack of Blackburn all over it because I'm using a lighter it's not the cleanest way to do it but it does work as I say I would typically use a you know sort of a hot air rework station and what that does is that shrinks that heat shrink down to size and then once it cools it then goes hard and if we go back to our microscope you could see that of my lighters melted my wire a little bit there but it the most important thing is that is now sealed so that is you know sort of a nice neat and tidy joint that you can you can have in whatever you're working with and that's not going to come apart because it's all sealed up it's not likely to ever corrode so so that's that's basically that so that's you know just sort of just demonstrating doing a wire joining us say the most important part with that is making sure that you heat what you're wanting to solder and then you melt the solder to the component or to the part they are soldering rather than onto the iron okay so the next thing we're going to do is I'm going to demonstrate soldering a component onto a board and I'm going to do that by just grabbing a little nondescript resistor here there we go this is a resistor this is the board that I'm going to mount it on to and so if we look at this you can see of all the little holes here and let's just say I was building an electronics kit or something like that so I basically been the bin the pins of the resistor turn this off here so you can bend the bend the pins of the resistor here and then poke them through the holes of the board like so okay so that's the that's a resistor sitting in the sitting on the board there and then on this side I would generally grab you know sort of a pair of pliers or something like that and just gently not hard but just gently grab this way pull it a little bit and bend it and then grab this side pull a little bit and bend it those bends are now stopping it from from falling out so that's going to stay in place while we do the solder in there little why's that have bent there so let's jump back now to the microscope and we will have a look there's our there's why number one and there's why number two and I am now going to just solder these wires in place so we'll start with this one grab my trusty soldering iron and again applying the heat to the components you want to solder to and then melting onto those components now this is really where I was referring to the difference between a conical tip and a and a beveled tip now if I show you a bevel tip I'm going to show you a great big bevel tip but it's just for the purpose of demonstrating so this is a bevel tip here and you can see that you've got this great big flat surface and what I like about these is you can apply them like this and apply a large surface area of heat down onto any board that you might be working with but with the the fine point tip like this one you have more trouble getting the heat where you want it to go now what you could do is you can maybe lie this down so you get a little bit more surface area of the iron on to what it is you're trying to solve it to so anyhow I'm just going to hold that there that's applying some heat to the to the pad and to the wire and then just going to grab this and melt and melting on to the pad and on to the wire and there we go and as you can see we've got a lovely neat clean tidy little blob going on there and then just a matter of clipping the excess of that wire off so that's that and there you have a lovely clean solder joint going on there it's just I'm out all looking lovely neat and tidy so let's do that again on on the other end so we've got we've got the soldering iron we hold that onto the the copper pad and we're holding it onto the wire as well to try and transfer heat to both and then we just get the solar we melt that it's melting onto the pad and melting on to the pin as well so there we go another lovely neat and tidy ball cut off the excess there we go once again another neat and tidy sort of ball there now I've done that without any flux at all other than the flux that was in the solder so so what I would recommend with that is you know sort of to probably use things like a you know breadboard like this to practice try and practice getting nice blobs when you're soldering like that and keep in mind that I'm using a 29.95 soldering station here so it's not all about having fancy equipment there we go nice beautiful little blobs of solder recommend a sort of practising practising them so that's basically it for this as a beginners gone I'll probably do another video later on that goes into soo into some more advanced soldering so perhaps you know soldering some ICS onto boards or you know some some smaller components but just as a basics of beginners guide that's pretty much all I wanted to I wanted to show please feel free to leave comments or if there's anything else you would like me to demonstrate just put in a request and I'll see what I can do so thanks for watching

Channel: Branchus Creations

Views: 746,319

Rating: 4.9017444 out of 5

Keywords: soldering, electronics, soldering for beginners, soldering tutorial, beginners guide to soldering, learn to, electronic soldering, beginners, learn to solder, intro to soldering, how to solder, soldering wires, soldering station, diy, soldering iron, soldering tips, solder, flux, tutorial, how to, soldering kits, soldering kits for beginners, electronic components

Id: M2Jf8cebwCs

Length: 33min 6sec (1986 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2019