How To Make A Desoldering Bath From An Iron Or Toaster Or Hob

[Music] hi so we've been looking at reclaiming and repurposing and reusing discarded equipment mostly discounted kitchen equipment but all kinds of things really maybe you can start looking in that sort of stuff you're gonna come across an awful lot of these things electronics boards this one was pulled from a toaster and he has a really interesting thing here is a little electromagnet there actually that's kind of cool this thing I forget where that came from but there's a quite a few interesting bits as a relay there there's a nice toroid too there's good capacitor couple of power resistors so there's always lots of really interesting things on these boards that can be reused and this stuff actually is the real curse because an awful lot of things could just be pulled apart and reefs melted and reused these things when you burned them they tend to be pretty toxic and isn't what a pen in the neck to get this stuff off so it takes a lot of effort to get it off and that makes it worthless really because these these aren't very much to buy and if you're gonna spend a couple of hours trying to pet take one off it's just not worth it people get fed up and this is the curse this is the thing that really gets thrown away and really causes all the problems because removing them is about taking this solder off and pulling them out and once you do that you can reuse them but it's a utter pen in the neck and takes forever so somebody said to me Rob why don't you do a video on making a desoldering bath so that we basically can dip this in the bath and just pull them off and I thought that's an awesome idea actually and so we're going to a desoldering bath specifically recover the components or things like that desoldering bath is actually really quite easy it's a pot containing molten solder which obviously is the right temperature to make that liquid you put the top of that in the molten solder all the other solar gets loose and you can just pull the bits off really quite easily with a pair of pliers so it's a pot with more than solder in it now that's a heat application and any heat applications really have the same three things involved in them some kind of heat source some kind of heat control and some kind of box you can put it in those are the three things that you need and you're gonna do heat application now with a soldering bath what we need really is a small tub that we can apply heat to the bottom and that we can get into because we don't make a great big vat of solder we want quite a little bit of solder so once you think about that then you can start looking at where your heat sources are coming from now obviously we've got a whole host of things taken around that we can use as heat sources I'm got you're going to use this because it's a a little 2 ring oven that you can buy for sort of 15 pounds or so and you probably see that the state of this I've had this for a number of years and it's finally time to repurpose it or throw it away or something like that because I also got another one there's this one just getting a bit too horrible and cruddy and I just don't want to throw it away I want to find a use for it so I'm going to use this but there are other things that you can use this for instance is the base plate of a household iron but the best part of a household iron will get up to about 250 degrees just as an arm if you do a little modification to it which is about changing the bimetallic contact you can get that up to about 500 degrees no problem and here's the heating element right there and of course that's all nicely sealed in so if you were to cut this out which you could do with a dremel or an angle grinder you get a sealed in beautiful heating unit dedicated to the purpose of heating that metal plate we fix that metal plate to another piece of metal so we go something like that you've got a you've got a desoldering bath so that would be a really cool thing to do the other thing you could do is pull apart a toaster which is what I did inside a toaster what you've got is a whole lot of this thin strip this thin strip actually is cancel wire now Council wire could be bought on the roll just like that and this is made for kilns I use this to repair my kiln so you get the cancel by buying a roll or by pulling apart a toaster the good thing about the toaster is this material it song as a sheet it was quite tough and it allows you to cut shape and wipe the cancel around that shape and there you go you've got another heating element so you need a source of a heating element and there are lots of things around from buying camphor wire falling apart toaster using a household iron or in my case this thing here there is amazing this thing here is as it was once for that and I could put my tub whatever size I like onto that and I've got myself a really nice heating unit the other thing that I need obviously normally the heating unit is some way of controlling it now there are lots of ways of controlling it toasters just used timer as it happens they have a little circuit in there controlled by this pretentious stat that ticks away the time sometimes best and I see sometimes based on a capacitor resistor combination charges the capacitor the resistor drains it that's of a fixed time the potentiometer acts as the resistor you change that resistor you change the time the capacitor drains and the capacitor drains they bridge the current the electromagnet and up pops you toast so toasters just use time the bimetallic strips a really interesting material it's two layers of metal on top of each other and when you heat different metals expand at different revs and commonly uses brass and copper sorry brass copper and steel brass and steel is very common when you heat that you'll get a bend going away and you have a little screw contact here screw the thing down to that level as it heats it already is just releasing the tension the screws holding on it till it gets the set temperature when it just opens that contact the higher of the screw then the lower the temperature needed to open the contact and so you can use that as an analogue way of controlling your hint now that's what you'll find in a household iron it's also what's in here incidentally another more controlled way takes a little bit of electronics and so you need to buy some electronics here is a head controller to temperature controller it actually controls this which is a solid rely the science that wheeler takes its control from here and turns the power off and on here it does that by taking a signal from a thermocouple so you need three parts a pit controller a solid state relay and a thermocouple if you are all those together then you get really nice control your digital controller you hate the only problem is they're about thirty pounds or so so if you want to do a really controlled job then you want to be spending 230 pounds give yourself a little controller set which other says they relay the controller and the thermocouple all that is is a heatsink for the relay but you want to spend thirty quid on that and that will get you really nice control over what it is you gonna do for something like a desoldering tub where you don't really want that massive amount of perfect control over something you just want to be able to hold it in the range of somewhere around about 235 maybe 400 degrees somewhere in that range then a thermocouple a bad metallic strip sorry is going to be ideal really and we'll have a look at a closer look of a bimetallic strip contact looks like when we take this thing to pieces so there's a whole host of ways that you can do that now when it comes to making the box again you've got a whole host of decisions you can make in it it's basically deal with some prettiness more than anything so I made a heating bath out of this and what this is is a frying pan an ashtray I don't old toaster and that's how I made that heating pan I think it kind of looked pretty it's a very low temperatures I don't have to worry about the base but we want to get up quite high so we need to get it really a bit more consideration on what that's actually going to be like okay that's enough of me talking what I'm gonna do now is build that about desoldering bath and this old cooker again remember anything follows the same principles this old hot leg and I think I'm going to make the contender from this because I happen to have it around it she come with me new about millimeters thick it's plenty really and I'm going to score cut bend and fold that and fold that up into my container for my desoldering bath so that's the plan let's take this apart and have a close look on the inside so our main reason for choosing this was that it really was made for this originally we're just repurposing it more than anything because obviously it's a heating unit it was made to boil water cook food gets up to about 500 degrees centigrade no worries at all and it's all nicely sealed and ratted to do that job so we've got some nice rubbery flaps that will take the heat we've got some control buttons here a little LED and to play so I flipped over get a nice connection block here external to the unit here you can see that the power has been connected to these cloth-covered wires these cloth-covered wires a heat resistance rendered to the temperature this will reach the four screws in the bottom then we can pull that open we pull that item you can have a look at the inside okay so there is the kahit control that's a bimetallic strip so the knob pushes down pushing that little lever there down into contact when that heats and bends it has to bend further so it takes a long while for that contact that opened which means that this gets hotter those two contacts one goes to the heat plate there one goes the heat plate there all these wires are nice and cloth covered at an on indicator light there and I'm going to take this apart now you had to look on the inside and have a look at those components on the bench top okay so here's our Hall of gear these are the heating coils and incidentally they're the same ones that you find in your oven what they are is a coil of kanthal wire stuck in this tube here and then packed with an awful lot of ceramic and that's all they actually are and then used to reside in this cash spiral so I've taken them out the cash spiral and we lifted out relatively easily so that we have the coils all by themselves because we don't really want that plague we just want the heat the next bit we've got is two rather nice here and here bimetallic strip analog heat controllers remember we're going for analog because we don't really need that much control if you want more control then obviously you're gonna have to buy yourself a controller but this is a bit of scrap I have it lying around and I want to repurpose it there the knobs they're the only arms are using neon lights then we have the case that connected the live cable there's the quality live care board it's rubber and heat insulation here's a whole lot of heat insulation wires with some extra heat insulation there so we now have everything we need to make the internals of our desoldering bath okay just to get a sense of what this has been a bit like before I had she starts cutting the metal is I'm got a bit of cardboard and made up a mock box for it so I can open that box that will give me my map for putting it onto the metal and cutting the metal so you don't have to get a sheet of metal you can use something else like a an old pan or or a cooking dish or tinder for something else or a project box a whole host of things but I'm going to unfold that sheet metal and a briquette box that looks like that it just gives me a chance to see whether everything works - remember this is going to be sunk down a bit and that's the bit where they solders gonna go my control knob will go here the little LED light indicator on there so everything fits rather nicely it kind of urban on me it's a bit large we couldn't make it a little bit smaller but I can't like room to work and then I can actually do my desolder know solving in there and the heater unit will go in there with plenty of space to keep the heater off the bench and plenty of connection room for everything so a quick mock-up allows me to do all the back kick my initial and transfer that to my sheet of aluminium okay so here we go to transfer to the aluminium ready to bend I've drilled out lots of the holes already where the neon lights going to go the control switch is going to go these are actually cooked itself tappers I'm going to use the whole thing together I haven't drawn out the big hole in the center I've just put a marker hole in it because if you drew another big one when it comes to bending it round here gets quite weak and you get a distortion which is a bit irritating really so I've drilled out all the holes and all I have to do now is bend it now the bending sequence you have to have a think about it because these tabs and that's what they're going to be here a bit rough that's okay because it's going to be inside the body but they need to be a nice night grease so they want to be bent first really and so you need a quick think about how you can event it because sometimes things get in the way anyway let's get on [Music] [Music] okay so I've drilled the hole in the top and now I'm going to try and fix my action drag into that hole okay that's the body of the machine made now I need to fit all the electronics make a bottom put some feet on it and we're ready to go when I say electronics of course what we're talking about is this thing you buy metallic strip this thing the heater coil and the neon light okay so that's it finished I fluffed it open see you can have a seat it's widen exactly the same way that the cooker was wired because basically all we've done is take those bits and put them into a different box but there's the heating coil have held it down with four wranglings there so it's nice and firm actually there's the bimetallic strip which so temperature controller in line incidentally here was an automatic cutoff switch at 250 degrees C 240 volts so a bit of a safety feature in there the neons there that's what it looks like on the top so all I have to do is put a bottom on which I've made which is it med the same way just to be solemn inium foldable room sore feet screwed on but the bottom there's the connection block again we took this off the cooker and those have crimped connections such according to the wiring regulations are permanent connections so we've crimp them together is stuff that in screw that cover unscrew that on all we have to do then is turn it off turn it on and get some solder in there okay the unit itself is actually working really nicely what we got here basically is a pool of molten metal and the unit heats it up slowly and then keeps it a temperature now made a couple of little things I put a cooling fin on here because it was a bit worried that that plastic was close to this aluminium body and then a minyan body obviously gets quite hot and then in here I put some insulation as well and as you can see it's actually working really quite nicely keeping that metal liquid now I've never done this before so it is an adventure for me what a plan on doing is trying to remove a few components from this board here and we'll see how well we go now it's quite difficult to grip the edge of the board and slide it in there so what I've done is I've drilled a hole in the board and I've inserted a screw so that I can actually hold that a bit more successfully than just trying to grip the edge of the board so I'm gonna grip that screw and we'll see what we can do with it I've got a pair of pliers here to pick that off and I believe all you do is dip the thing in oh yeah that is all you do look at that whoops I've just dropped it as a shame so that just comes straight off when you dip it in the hot metal that's awesome actually I was like I'm frying there we go look at that that is really quite awesome it takes no time at all when you're used to it just to get that in there and put that part out that is amazing I always find a challenge to get these bits out sorry these bits that transform this and I absolutely love them because you can do so much work with them so I'm gonna give that a girl look at that straight out that's amazing okay I have never owned one of these before so I don't know that much about them but clearly temperature is an issue so we're gonna have to read that temperature maybe mark some temperatures on something like that because they just having a liquid metal of this thing it's not I know if it needs to be liquid but at a certain temperature but it's astounding how those components come off just so easily and so cleanly I mean this heat is probably gonna damage some of them it certainly did with this power connector as you can see these are power resistors I took somewhere else no problem it's all toroid no problem that's a little like no electromagnet from a toaster no problem so it's just a load of gear that I was able to get off particularly when they have multiple solder points that was just a piece of cake so I'm loving this actually and I'm gonna play with that a bit more I might put a pit controller than mine actually do an update on it and do a pit controller but for a bit of scrap that you find around and half a day's effort that's an extraordinarily useful tool I think so I hope you enjoyed the video thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 19,349

Rating: 4.9481554 out of 5

Keywords: desoldering, desodering, fwg, robert, electronics, diy, murray-smith, bath, solder, desolder, soldering, equipment, lab, home, made, homemade, built, laboratory, science, fair, project

Id: veJtEznpNF0

Length: 20min 55sec (1255 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2020