How To Solder Properly, With Extra Tips!

hi there and welcome to mister since lab today I'm going to show you some different soldering techniques that might make your life just a little bit easier and I'm gonna include some soldiering tips and tricks along the way so let's get started so you've purchased yourself a brand new soldering iron what's the very first thing that you should do before you even turn the soldiering iron on well aside from putting the iron in the stand and wetting the sponge or getting your abrasive cleaner ready you need to have some solder ready whether it's 6337 60/40 or lead-free whatever you're comfortable using you need to have that ready do not turn on your soldering iron until you have your solder ready the soldering iron should be set between oh say 300 degrees C and 350 degrees C to start you'll find that that's a very comfortable range just to be working in normally for some applications you might need to bring that a little bit higher and we'll talk about that here in just a little bit so the reason that you need to have some solder ready before you turn on your brand new iron is if the tip of your brand new iron remains dry so no solder on it you will greatly and I mean greatly reduce the life of that tip and you don't want to do that so when you turn on your iron for the first time this iron here is well used is a very old iron think about 20 years old now very dependable device really liked using it but I'll use this as an example here so when you first turn your iron on you want to have solder pretty much just laying on the tip all right and then when it gets hot you're gonna find that it's gonna start to melt right away coat the tip of the iron thoroughly with solder at that point you put it back in your stand you really don't have to worry about it for a little while now the tips of these newer soldering irons they have a plating material on them and that gives the tip an extended lifetime way back in the day tips used to be mad at a copper and that's why people used to file or sand them down is because if you apply solder to a copper tip it will erode very fast now here's the thing if you file or sand one of these tips and take the plating off underneath is copper and Willie rode that tip so sometimes even within hours you know a nice sharp tip will turn into a little stump at the end you definitely don't want that to happen so do not file or sand or even use the tip of your iron for prying on things if you work on point-to-point wiring sometimes it might get a little bit tempting to say if you're trying to work on a tube socket or something like that you know and you want to either unwrap a wire or you know press on a wire if you scrape the tip excessively you're gonna scrape through that pleading material and then the tip is done now when you're using the iron in normal service what you do is you take it you clean the tip off like this so get rid of the solar you can use one of these cleaners as well whatever you're comfortable with then you'll start doing your work so you'll start doing your soldiering and then when you're done before you put the iron back into the holder here again you want to re-wet the tip make sure there's lots of solder on it put it back in the tip and you're good to go this is a necessary step and yes there is waste product by doing this if you do this your soldiering iron tip will last an incredibly long time now here's the thing if you want to scrimp and save on solder you're gonna end up spending money on soldering iron tips that's just the way it is so there always is a little bit of a waste product there it's just the way it is that's why you see you know solder chunks all over my my little sponge here and this if you were to look in here I'm sure you'd find lots in there as well it's just necessary so if you buy a newer iron say it's a Weller hako or whatever it is you'll find that they usually come with a generic tip and again no matter what iron it is always make sure the minute that you turn it on the first time that you have some form of solder laying on it so that it's wedded now there's a lot of fake tips on the market so I like hako products I just always have I find that they last a very long time this is the original element and everything and this is about 20 years old of course I've gone through tips in that time but everything else is still all original very dependable device cord and everything is is all original nice Kord now the thing is is if you get a fake tip if you're a hobbyist that's fine you know they lost a fair amount of time genuine tips lasts way longer a lot more plating on them so there are a lot of fake tips for hate goes out there I call them fake oohs so there's a lot of fake Oh tips out there so if you're going to be using your soldering iron on a regular basis say you're you know you're more than average use I guess you could say I would definitely suggest going with a genuine tip because they they really do last a long time again as long as you keep it wetted and and you know you're you're good to it you're not using it as a pry bar or something like that I've disordered this component here and if I remove the component it would be very careful when you remove components from double-sided circuit boards that you do not pull the plated through-hole out so far shine a light through here you can see how this trace ends here and that carries on on the other side of the circuit board and goes up to the other side here pencil the point with here so if you look right in the center of that hole you can see how it's shiny in there well that shiny area you see in there is a barrel inside this it's carrying this trace on to the other side and then this is just running on that's a plated through-hole now whenever you're pulling out a component you see that kind of glaring in there shiny whenever you're pulling out a component got to be very careful that you don't take that plated through-hole out because you'll eliminate the connection from the top side to the bottom side of the board when you do that then you have to go to the top side and solder both sides that plated through-hole makes putting components at a board quite a bit easier just because you drop them and you can solder them on one side you're ready to go now when you're soldering something with a plated through-hole the dwell time of your soldering iron so the dwell time is the amount of time that you keep the iron on the trace so the dwell time has to be just a little bit longer because the solder has to not only flow on this side it should flow through the hole around the lead of the component so that way you're not only just relying upon this little solder connection here but it's soldered right through the barrel onto the other side of the board that just makes a good solid connection especially in rework now when these boards are put together very fast sometimes they're not soldered very well and you can actually see almost down the plated through-hole from the other side and they're relying upon that little barrel inside there to basically carry onto the upper side of the board now it's okay but you know the better the connection the better right so that's what dwell time is the amount of time that you keep your iron on the board now you'll notice that single sided boards won't have so much area so all of this trace and the barrel and everything pulls heat away from your iron and that's why you need to have a little bit more dwell time on a single sided board you'd basically only have this come up to this little eyelet area here there would be no barrel and it wouldn't carry through on to the other side of the board so your dwell time is going to be quite a bit less just because pretty much ends here now it's quite a fine balance when you're soldering if you have the iron on the board too long you'll cause these things to lift off the board and you don't want to do that so having your soldering iron temperature right is very important so when I'm soldiering these boards again my soldering iron is between 300 and 350 degrees C and it seems to work just fine for these plated through holes now for more area some of this on the way here for more area like this what you see right here this of course is going to take quite a bit more temperature in order to dassault or something now you can see that they've added reliefs here so you can see how it looks like a little cross in the center they've done that so that soldering this is not incredibly hard because you'd have all of this copper area pulling the heat away from that joint if they didn't have those little reliefs and that's the reason that they add those there it also makes desoldering a lot easier as well that's the reason that you see those reliefs basically just for ease of soldering is to make sure it's dependable when they're going through their process so in order to solder a component on here again again we want to clean the tip of our iron make sure that there's nothing on it we would come in like so and we're just going to touch the iron here like this you can see how nicely that flows around there and we have a good connection there so if I was to solder this other one here you can see that there's nothing in there it'll just fill the hole at this point what's giving an example here is it'll just start to fill the hole see that little hole it's going down through the hole now if you've pulled a plated through hole out if you pull that little barrel out of the center it won't do that the solder will just sit on one side of the board and it won't connect to the other side of the board and again in any kind of reworking you have to be very very careful that you don't pull on the component you really need a decent desoldering tool and again we'll do a D soldiering video as well here in the very near future I'll show you how to do that effectively in safely you pull plated through holes out in some particular applications and it can be a very nasty and timely fix when working on point-to-point electronics the procedure is very similar to working on a circuit board so what you do is you take your component in this case this is a tube sock if this is an octal tube socket so 6 B 6 6 6 6 s and 7 or whatever you plug into this thing you insert the component through the hole right there it's a little tab the bottom of the tube socket see we have a resistor to this pin as well now contrary to popular belief you don't need to wrap these around the tube socket the next time this needs to be serviced if something goes wrong it really makes cleaning everything off a real big pain and again it really isn't necessary you just poke the components through and solder them it's absolutely fine to do that or if you're more comfortable you can wrap it as well now before we solder it away clean the tip off again and you just pretty much come in the same way now again we're dealing with dwell time it kind of watch the joint and just make sure that there's a decent amount of solder on the connection you can see that the flux is just run down the pin here that can be cleaned off and as you can see it's a nice solid connection there now way back in the day some schools taught you to wrap the leads around the socket and just add enough solder basically just to coat the lead in the socket so you'd actually still see a hole here and maybe two components wrapped around it just a touch of solder that really isn't good practice fill the hole up you want to fill that in really well again you know solder is cheap and you definitely don't want to have to go in there again because something's haywire because the solar didn't take so just fill the hole up a little bit of extra solder isn't gonna hurt anything and you definitely know that you've got a really good connection there and then this would run off to terminal tie strip or another tube socket or something like that that's basically how you work on point-to-point not much different than circuit boards instead of working straight down you're kind of working from the side that's all in a chassis like this you'll see that they've got little tabs on the side of the tube socket retainer ring that you can solder to so basically this is just chassis ground again this is somewhat of a thermal relief from Seoul during the tube socket directly to the chassis now soldering something like this chassis is not possible with you know a regular iron like this you need to really come in with the big guns so to say and you need to go in here and melt this puddle like this now this gets extremely hot this is a piece of number 10 wire in here and I did a video on these a little bit earlier yes an old Weller D 550 gets extremely hot much much hotter than one of those irons can get I'll just give you an example here so it's dead cold right now so I'll just put this on the chassis here and hum it away see how hot that is that's causing a piece of number-10 wire basically glow so you can see that it's melting this puddle already basically you add solder and eventually what's gonna happen is this puddle here is gonna liquefy you see it's already starting to liquefy see I'm pushing the puddle around on here already so this is what you need to do large work like this they need a lot of heat again this is above and beyond what a normal soldiering iron will do so if you need to do any kind of chassis soldiering you want to solder say a tube socket to the chassis now what they did here at the factory to take that out of here what they did at the factory is they've used the tabs on here you can see that there's a ground that was originally connected to one of the tabs on the side of the socket and they wanted to make sure that the actual socket was grounded to the chassis very well so there would be no issues you can see how that these are just riveted to the chassis and that allows corrosion to form between here and sometimes you get a bad connection and bad things happen you know you get static in a circuit or you know basically just a bad connection so you don't want that to happen so what they've done is they've used this for a ground but they've also soldered the tube socket directly to the chassis ground for a nice solid ground now you can get away with soldering these little tabs here you need to turn your soldering iron up a little bit higher this you know 380 to 400 be fine for something like that and this has got some oxidization on it so if I was to solder this I would want to add a little bit of flux I'll use this one here it's in the light a little bit better so add a little bit of flux to this that's just gonna help clean that off I'll turn my iron up just a little bit here about 380 something like that grab a bit of solder again wipe the tip off and I'll come in here like so see that hopefully you can see that and you can see that that's a nice connection right there that would have been a nice connection if something was in there so no problem soldiering that we're promising this ain't easy can see it's a pretty direct connection and it's pretty thick again 380 400 o'problem kzassault or something like that chassis again you'd need to use the larger gun with that small tip on it in order to do surface mount soldering things get just little bit trickier you need a specialized tip or at least a different tip than what was on the other iron different than what most irons come with you need some pretty small diameter solder and you need pair tweezers that are non magnetic magnetic tweezers are a real pain and need to be able to hold the component onto the little circuit board or whatever this is just a test circuit board that I have for experimenting with different components so in order to make this work first of all can set your temperature down on your iron quite a bit I'll clean the tip off here you can see that I've got somewhat of a hooked tip here and that makes work quite a bit easier it's a pretty fine tip and I can get in here and solder each lead so right now I've pretty much wiped this tip off so I'm gonna do is add just a little bit of solder right to the tip I'll put this down here I'll show you what I'm doing I'm gonna add just a little bit of solder to this tip right now Reina bowed here just like that now this solder really doesn't take all that well so now what I'm going to do is add flux to this this is very important for any kind of surface mount work especially re work in anything like that don't rely upon the flux in the solder or you're gonna have a really rough time so just smear it around with this so then what you do is align the component up with the pads just like so try and get everything about as centered as you can what I usually do at this point is I just touch the top give it a bit of a push to make sure that it's breakdown now the solder that's on the tip will get whipped up because of the flux on the pad here so what I'm going to do is just touch the pad and you can see that it's pretty much wicking it up and pulling it on to the surface now I can let go of this and that's completely soldered at that point so now I can move this around and make the solder connections quite a bit nicer so I'll clean this off and I'll just come in here like so see how nicely that solders now come in here like so and work my way around the device now if you're working on a larger circuit board sometimes it's not this incredibly easy to get in here and do your soldiering you go and touch that last one up and there it is it's soldered on so this is just a little gate that I've soldered on here now what I would end up doing is again for this board I would use lacquer thinner in a well-ventilated area and just clean off all the flux and I can look through this area here to make sure that there's you know no connections or anything like that so I've got the focus fixed right now because this is such a small device I don't want this thing to wander but at any rate there is no connections in there that's a it's pretty sound everything is good at any rate if I was to shine light under here I would look between the leads just to make sure there's no little solder balls or anything but I can even see on camera that it's a nice clean nice clean job and that's how you solder components on surface mount or surface mount components onto a circuit board well there's I'll get another little circuit board here and I'll say solder on a resistor let's take a look at an O 402 component here so you sneeze and this one disappears see how small that is I'm actually using an external monitor through the camera to see this so in order to solder this is pretty much the same way that we did the other one we add just a little bit of flux and we use the wetted tip of the iron to solder this down so what I'm going to do is put this on top of the pads I already have my tip wetted here just gonna press this down just to make sure that it is on those pads it doesn't look like it is there it is and at this point here again I'll give it a bit of a press and just touch it and now it's on there now unfortunately it's kind of hard to see cuz the flux is obscuring things here so that flux on the other side will be just fine you want to attack the one side and then tack the other so this side is a good solder now now I'm going to go back to this side here and do that side and that little Oh 402 component is now on their nice little solid connection there now you can see a small that component is this kind of stuff you really want a microscope for this is a pin alright so you can get an idea of how big that is pretty small component again small microscope or magnifier and you can get away with this as I've mentioned in some of my other videos once you start working with surface mount components like this if you like to build circuit boards you'll never go back to doing through-hole ever again it just cuts down on all the drilling so and it makes nice little small circuits you can make you know some pretty compact little circuits like this so that's how you solder all these different technologies and different sized components if you're interested in learning more about electronics vacuum tube and solid-state technology alike or you just want to view more of my videos I have many more videos on patreon as well I have an ongoing electronics course there and I've also started releasing my printed circuit board files there so you might want to check that out I'll have the link just below this video in the description and I'll probably pin the link as well just below that so if you enjoyed this video you can let me know by giving me a big thumbs up and hang around it'll be many more videos like this coming in the near future touching on vacuum tube solid-state electronics and all sorts of other tips and tricks so until next time take care bye for now you you

Channel: Mr Carlson's Lab

Views: 307,521

Keywords: Learn to solder, soldering lessons, solder the right way, teach soldering, soldering iron lessons, solder electronics, solder with Mr Carlson

Id: Tf2vxwm52fU

Length: 22min 29sec (1349 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2017