Choosing The Right Solder, Tech Tips Tuesday.

hi there and welcome to another tech tips Tuesday in this episode we're going to take a look at solder and we're going to determine which solder is the best for you so we're going to do is we're going to look at the diameter of the solder and what they put in the solder what kind of flux they're using what's safe to use and what isn't safe to use for electronics so let's just get right into the video here's a bunch of solder that I use on a regular basis and yes I do pronounce the L in solder so if you're standing in a store and you're staring at a whole bunch of solder on a shelf and you're thinking to yourself oh man there's such a huge selection here what do I choose well you're not alone a lot of people get confused with this because there really is quite a selection of what to use and a lot of people make a mistake that's really quite common and this is one of the mistakes right here and I'll tell you about that here quite shortly so really to make this nice and short and sweet if you like to work on say guitar amplifiers that are point-to-point wired so vacuum tube equipment where you have exposed pins on the bottom of a chassis if you like to work on through-hole circuit boards and you might be able to get away with doing some surface mount work the best diameter to use is a point zero three two this is kind of a middle-of-the-road if you wanted to play it safe you'll be feeding more of this stuff in there but a point zero to zero is definitely safe for working on surface mount equipment you'll be able to do the surface mount stuff quite easily with this if you're working on circuit boards just regular through-hole circuit boards point 0 to 0 will work just fine but if you're going to be working on Sassy's you know with a point-to-point wiring say vacuum tube equipment this is verging just a little bit too thin you're going to be feeding a lot of solder in there and you'll probably go through a little bit more solder that way so point zero three two I find is a nice middle-of-the-road diameter solder to be using for pretty much everything as I say when you get down to surface mount work you know if you're doing sizes that are Oh 603 and you know 1206 and stuff like that you probably get away with this I should say Oh 603 Oh 805 - 1206 you probably get away with this if you're going to start to go down - Oh 402 you know at that point of course you're wetting the tip of your iron and you're just basically using what's on the tip of your iron with some external flux and I'll touch on that here in just a little bit another thing to be very leery of is what's inside the solder you have to know what's inside it you can't be using acid core flux or acid core flux paste like the stuff they use for plumbing soldering and stuff like that for anything that's electronic because it'll just basically corrode the traces right off the circuit board and take tinning off so you have to be very very careful of what's inside your solder now the three basic flux or rosin cores that you will find in a solder is type r type r a and type r ma all right so type r would be the weakest all right that's basically just rosin and there's absolutely no activators inside it so we need a very very clean surface for just a Type R flux so if it said flux and then it would just have a little R there that would mean that there there is no activation in it all right so the next one up that's a little bit more aggressive than an R would be an RMA which means rosin mildly activated so this is for pretty much working on nice clean circuit boards you know if you've cleaned the surface area and everything just fine you'll get away with an RMA flux and most RMA s are no clean you don't have to worry about it you can leave the residue behind you always want to check with the manufacturers data sheet on the solder to see if that's okay but most RMA type fluxes are absolutely fine to leave on the circuit board after you've done your sole during the next one up is Type R a flux and that's the stuff that I prefer to use you get it in liquid form and I fill it in a bottle and I'll even use it when I'm using an RMA flux or a solder with an RMA on the inside so what I do is if I'm working on circuit boards I usually put just a little square of this are a flux on there when I'm sorry soldering or doing anything like that and it makes the soldiering quite a bit nicer now you'll find that you know solder that sits on the debt on the end of your iron it kind of goes dead you know there's nothing in it that's really because it's boiled off all of the all the fluxes inside the actual solder so if you you know put a bit of a dab of are a type flux on what you're working on again usually it'll it'll kind of reactivate that solder but anything that's been sitting on the tip of your iron chances are there's burnt flux in it and it's going black or you know it gets dark so you should really clean that off of the tip of your iron before you go in and do any kind of soldiering so basically you want a nice clean tip that's just tinned so I find that these little it's kind of like an abrasive material it's uh almost like shavings that they put like a scouring pad a metal scouring pad and they work very very well for cleaning the tip of an iron as you can see my sponge is dried up over here it dries up really really fast this uh this place is very dry the moisture out of these sponges right now but I also find that if you use the sponge with a Saul during iron tip it does lessen the life of the tip and the reason that it does that is because if you have water or a cold substance on that sponge and you have a blazing-hot soldering iron tip which even for just regular soldering use is really really hot when you touch that really hot soldering iron tip to that wet sponge is a really really fast temperature difference there and sometimes that causes the tips to deplete after a while so I find that the the abrasive pad you know stuck inside of a little holder you can buy them like this and then you just you kind of poke your soldering iron in there a few times and the shavings they scrape all the crap off you find that you'll get a little bit longer tip life than using a wetted sponge so there's another little tip there for you years and years of soldering and replacing you know countless number of tips I also went to a hako machine I really like Haeckel products their tips seemed to last the longest out of all of the manufactures at least that I've tried and I don't want to be mentioning any other kinds of manufacturers but there are a lot of very common soldering irons on the market and the hakko just it seems to last the longest out of them and that's why I changed to ACO I very very rarely have to change tips on my iron do to them decaying or you know the plating going away I do change tips on the iron just depending on the kind of solder and work I'm doing of course if I'm soldering vacuum tube gear I want a bit of a chisel tip and if I'm doing surface mount work I use a hooked tip a very small hook tip and that works very very well in fact I can probably grab that one's got solder on it still so you see I have another tip here I can show you the little hook unfortunately I actually I do you have a hook tip right here so I'll just reach into my bag of various different tips I have all sorts of different tips as you can see in this bag here all these different tips are just for different use and if you're doing any kind of surface mount work this tip right here is a by far the nicest to use to focus on that and one you can do it there you go so there is the tip right there this is very very nice for surface mount work and of course whenever you're doing surface mount work basically you're wetting the tip and then putting some are a flux on the actual board and what happens is the the component on the circuit board wicks up the solder and I'll do an actual surface mount reworking tutorial here in the very near future so there's a few ideas for using different solders this one here a point zero one five diameter is very comfortable for o4o to work it doesn't you know you don't put too much on it it's a 6337 it seems to be the common now so 63 percent 10 and 37 percent lead I do have some 6040 older and this stuff is made by y:i KST and I've used this stuff for a while and it really it looks nice when you solder it and it works very very well if you take a look at any of the surface mount circuit boards that I use I try to use this solder on it because the basically when you're done the the little solder balls on the circuit board they almost look like polished chrome so this is very nice for that especially if you're gonna have an exposed circuit board that you're going to show people or anything like that I really like this solder not I'm all out of the bigger diameter of it now because I use it very often and this is also very good for vacuum tube equipment as well again I have some are a type flux in a bottle and that's very handy for just dispensing this is an ink bottle and I dispense this on the joints that I'm going to be soldering works very very well to add just a little bit of extra flux there I clean off my flux off of circuit boards and everything with either acetone or lacquer thinner so I find that acetone works works very very well tittie to get the flux off and a lacquer thinner I find also works very very well the lacquer thinner is a little bit different it doesn't leave streaking on on circuit boards that you make at home you'll find that the acetone will make streaking if you use alcohol you will get white streaking all over the place so I guess in order it would be alcohol acetone and then lacquer thinner lacquer thinner of course leaving the cleanest product of course acetone and lacquer thinner our vapor harmful and you want to be careful around that stuff you don't want to be breathing the fumes it's a it's a pretty intoxicating that stuff if you're ever working on anything with a ceramic substrate so up to achieving a an example we have a bmw x5 and it has Bosch electronics in it and the dynamic Stability control module went haywire in it and it has a ceramic substrate with basically an open die so the processors are all open in the bonding wires you can see them they run right into the the ICS and they have a jelly over top of them so I split the cap open on there and I went right down to the to the actual ceramic substrate on the bottom and I had to reattach some bonding wires under the microscope and of course that brought the the $2,000 module back to life about four years ago and it's still working just fine so whenever you're working on a ceramic substrate or anything like that you'll find that the the traces on them are usually a silver and you have to be very very careful you want solder with silver in it whenever you're going to be Sol during any kind of ceramic substrate because if you don't what'll happen is when you touch your soldering iron to the ceramic substrate it will migrate this the actual silver from the substrate onto your soldering iron tip and you'll be left with no trace so you want to be very very careful with that so if you're going to ever work on any kind of a ceramic substrate always use this is a lead-free solder this is tin and silver and I find that this works quite well and I don't get any migration issues of course dwell time with your soldering iron is a very important thing to know you don't want to keep your soldering iron on that on that substrate for a very long time now there's a couple of tricks to that as well if you're working on a ceramic substrate you'll find that it'll very very quickly suck the heat right off of the tip of your soldiering iron so you got to be careful with that so you have to have your soldering iron working relatively hot and you have to keep the dwell time very very short so uh yeah so that's one thing to keep in mind I've worked on all sorts of different types of ceramic substrates and stuff like that and really it's a bit of an art to it so if you ever get a chance to work on it you'll see what I mean or if you have some some old device with a ceramic substrate in it you can practice on an old device if you think that you're going to be doing that in the future so this solder with a red label on it has a red label for a reason and it's called organic core solder and a lot of people think that oh it's organic core and it says it's water-soluble so you know this is they think that this is old this is the really safe stuff absolutely incorrect Organic course alder is very very aggressive it is one of the most aggressive acorss inside of a solder if you leave this organic core the actual residue from the inside of the solder on anything that's tinned it will remove tin within hours it will just absolutely destroy circuit boards so you need to absolutely 100% wash all of the actual the the flux material on off of it this year see it says water-soluble rework flux if you put this stuff on tin and leave it for just a few hours it will take the tin right off it'll just absolutely it you know it's very very aggressive flux so if you are going to use if you're making your own circuit boards I don't suggest that you use an organic core solder if you are working on a circuit board that say has a lot of damage to it and it's really hard to work on say the maybe the copper or the traces are very oxidized you know that's where this is is a you know where this stuff kind of shines because it is a very aggressive very aggressive core but once you're finished working on it you need to make absolute 100% sure that you get all of this flux right off of the board if you don't get it off of the board your soldering connections will probably open within a month if you leave any kind of amount on it very very aggressive solder great great stuff if you have hard to work on or you know very oxidized traces and you know very very bad condition circuit board absolutely great stuff to use but again you just have to make sure that you get rid of everything so if you have a roll of solder and say the labels are peeled off and you don't know what kind of solder it is one very easy way to tell is when this stuff here when you melt it on a solder iron tip if you have this organic coarse solder it smells a lot like hot transmission fluid so if you have a solder when you're soldering it I'm not telling you to inhale the fumes because you know this stuff is vapor harmful so you know you got to be careful but the actual the dissent of the of the the flux residue when it's burning on a tip smells really really close to two very hot transmission fluid so again don't be inhaling this stuff though you know you want to be very very careful this stuff is vapor harmful and they tell you that right on here caution vapor harmful so you want to be very very careful for industrial use only it says this stuff here is basically this stuff in a pen so you can buy this stuff this rosin flux pen and these are you know relatively expensive if you were to buy a bunch of these things you could just buy a big bottle of this stuff and put it in an ink bottle like I do you know an ink bottle like this with the way I solder will last me a very very long time these things you'll find that you go through very easily and really what it is is just a little pen tip on the end and then you press this down on the circuit board this has got a little valve in it that will allow the flux to flow out onto this tip and you can brush this onto circuit boards if you want if you want to use a lesser amount after warn you about these pens though many times I've purchased these pens and when you push down to dispense the flux it just it almost shoots out so you got to be very very quick or very very easy with dispensing the the flux out of these pens and that's how most of these pens work so you just you give them a bit of a press on the circuit board and then it releases the the flux onto the tip of the of the pen there so that really is all of the soldiers here and you know a quick explanation of you know what to really choose so just quickly again if you want a general kind of solder that will almost work for everything point zero 3 2 diameter 6337 with an RMA flux works very very well so and to recap quickly again if you're going to start doing a little bit more if you're not going to be really doing any kind of through I shouldn't say through-hole chassis mount point-to-point work if you're just going to be doing surface mount and through-hole work point 0 to 0 will work just fine where this falls off again is when you're working on point-to-point equipment like vacuum tube gear that's when you want to you know have the point zero three two so in my own opinion the point zero three two is just really a happy medium for you know for for an everyday kind of solder a quick little bonus tip for this Tuesday hot glue removal so wanting to do is I'm going to take my hot glue gun here and I'm just going to be crazy and I'm going to hot glue some wires right to my bench surface this is industrial hot glue and it is sticky the bench surface is roughed up so if there's anything that this is going to stick to and it's going to stick to really bad it will be this surface so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to let this harden up and I'll be right back and I'll show you how to remove it alright this hot glue is stuck to the surface and as you can see I'm moving my bench really with this right now it's that stuck to the surface this this hot glue is really really tough stuff so the way to get rid of this is very very simple if you want to remove hot glue from a surface all you do is you take 99% rubbing alcohol and put just a little bit on the hot glue and just let it sit for just a moment you're probably thinking you know if the surface is agitated it would stick that much worse that litter I should say if it was roughed up it would stick that much worse so this surface is pretty rough and believe it or not the when the surface is rough like it's got scouring from sand paper on it the hot glue sticks really good but when you put the rubbing alcohol on it it releases it even easier because the actual rubbing alcohol gets into those little grooves and glows right underneath the right underneath the hot glue so when a hot glue has been sitting in rubbing alcohol for just a little bit all you got to do is work at the edge now I've already got this coming off at the edge with just my finger let's see if I can do it without using any tools seeing here we go just like that that's how easy hot glue comes off with rubbing alcohol now if you leave rubbing alcohol on the surface of the actual hot glue itself I'll try and do this around my tripod without bumping it there's some alcohol on the surface of my bench here I'll put a little bit more on here if you keep working at the actual surface that absolutely clean no hot glue on there whatsoever it just almost it doesn't really melt the stuff but it completely just uh releases it from whatever it's held to of course if this was going to be stuck to some form of a cloth wire or something like that I would imagine it would probably be a little bit tougher to get off but you know of course the rubbing alcohol is going to soak right into the cloth wire as well and probably release it just as well I haven't actually tried with a cloth wire but so if you've got any kind of hot glue on a surface inside of any of your equipment or I you like to use this hot glue just a temporary hold things sometimes while I'm working on something just a little bit of alcohol and the hot glue just just completely releases it just comes right off hope you found these tips useful today if you did you can let me know by giving me a big thumbs up and hang around there'll be many more tech tips tuesdays just like this touching on all sorts of different topics right now I'm in the middle of working on a really lengthy restoration video so hopefully I will have that up here pretty soon as well so until next time bye for now you

Channel: Mr Carlson's Lab

Views: 308,208

Rating: 4.891263 out of 5

Keywords: creativedesigncomponents.com, Creative Design Components, 63/37 solder, 60/40 solder, lead free solder, acid core solder, RMA flux, RA flux, R flux, Rosin core solder, Rosin flux, organic core flux, Kester, Alpha solder, multi-core solder

Id: V1aONINVkSE

Length: 22min 2sec (1322 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/VAdept]

I prefer the 63/37 Sn/Pb for the eutectic (which means it has a melting point, not a range) properties. Put a number of softrocks/MTR rigs together with it.

Spend the money and buy a 1 lb spool of Kester.

*edit: forgot a word.

[u/Americanjello]

The right solder is the one with lead in it.

[u/TreyWalker]

Can someone please edit the video to make it sound more like sodder? I didn't know I had a problem with this pronunciation until now... couldn't get past 0:32.

[u/Kilocycles]

Great video from Mr Carlson's Lab on selecting solder and flux for electronics work. There is something here for new folks and veterans.

[u/TortureSteak]

Kester #44 .05" is my goto for almost everything...

[u/MuadDave]

Do you guys have a recommended Pb-free solder? I have a project that I'm working on that has to be Pb-free.

[u/kc4umo]

Another great tutorial