How to Tin a Soldering Iron Tip or Re-tin an Old Soldering Iron Tip

this will be a short demonstration on how to properly in a soldering iron or if you have a used soldering iron how to properly maintain it this is an example of a properly tin soldering iron as you can see the tip is nice and shiny and clean this will provide us with good heat transfer to whatever we're soldering and because it's clean it will not contaminate whatever we're soldering here's an example of a soldering there and that is dirty and that will contaminate whatever we're soldering and needs probably a little wee bit of maintenance and should be read ten so this is what I'm going to show you how to do I'll show you in this video how to ten a brand new soldering iron before you start soldering or if you have a used soldering iron how to do a little bit of maintenance to get it in proper working order in this demonstration I will explain how to properly care and maintain your soldering iron tip pinning the tip is quite important and with proper tenting you will be able to complete a great soldering connection on a circuit board or on a terminal before you start soldering with your brand new soldering iron or even if you have an old soldering iron the tip on the soldering iron needs to be properly tinned these are some of the things that you will need before you can start pinning your soldering iron tip I tend to use some plumbers soldering paste right here 60/40 tin-lead solder a damp sponge now it should be damp not soaking wet a little bit of Steel whoa and a soldering iron stand and of course your soldering iron only one of these soldering irons has a properly end tip that would be this one right here you can see it's nice and shiny and goes partway up the tip this tip over here is very worn out in the shaping and since it's a metal tip we cannot grind it so it needs to be thrown away looks like there's hope for these two and they need to be properly tent and these are the two that I'm going to work on and show you how to tend them what we'll do is we'll pretend this soldering iron is a brand new soldering iron and the tip needs to be ten so what I do is I take my 60/40 lead tin solder and I just wrap it around the tip it doesn't matter which way your wrap one or let wrap it clockwise or counter clockwise the effect will still be the same but make sure you do this before you plug it in here we are a couple of minutes later and you can see the solder is slowly liquefying and melting off the the iron tap so we'll just let it continue on for another few seconds until it's all melted off now we're going to use the plumbers paste so what I'm going to do now is just very carefully wipe this clean on the steel wool careful not to burn your fingers dip it into the plumbers paste we're going to send smoke signals out and then melt some more solder onto the end of the tip like that and again be careful you don't burn your fingers and keep going at it with the solder we get the end of the tip nice and shiny slowly get in there you you keep wiping it clean with the iron oh here we go look at that starting that catch look how shiny it is on on this side but not so much on the other side so we'll dip into the facet flux this acid flux is only used for this purpose to get the iron 1010 this will make the tip last a little wee bit longer there we go so there we have a perfectly tender tip let's zoom in on that so here we have a properly end tip and you can see it's properly coated all the way up the tip here and this will help provide you or help make a good solder joint once we start soldering on a circuit board on terminals or what-have-you you'll see you have a soldering iron tip that looks something like this this is really not properly tin so we're going to clean this up and make this look a lot better again you don't want to put this into a grinder or a wire wheel because they'll destroy the temple and the only tips that you can reshape our pure copper tips so what we'll do is we're going to put this into the soldering iron stand and heat it up first okay I'm waiting for this soldering iron to heat up to full operating temperature so I've got my 60/40 solder my acid-base flux in my steel wool so we'll just have to wait a few minutes for this soldering iron to heat up and then we'll give it a whirl and get it properly tin and rehabilitate it well we're waiting for the iron to heat up let's talk a little wee bit about the soldering paste now this is an acid soldering paste or flux on routinely uses when they solder copper pipes you can see that we have some warnings on it this is a lethal and it is corrosive so you have to be very careful when using this stuff I like using it only for conditioning a soldering and you can see that this looks much like car grease for your car this is I find to be the most effective when reconditioning a soldering iron again make sure you're using 60/40 solder and that it is a rosin core here I'm using a point eight millimeter or point zero three two of an inch in diameter this rosin core solder is much like a straw with the flux or rosin in the middle of it so let's see if this iron is hot enough to start to recondition it what I'm going to do is I'm going to see if I can melt some solder on the end oh yeah there we go so what I'm going to do I'm just going to give us a little wipe with the steel wool here then I'm going to again stick it into the and here let's keep cleaning it we're going to hit it with the solder and I'm going to be sending up a lot of smoke signals here so make sure you're not breathing in the fumes if you do this in a well-ventilated area the object get the whole kept nice and shiny Oh anyone rotoiti nee tiny spot that doesn't want to there there we go we got it now so there we have the tip my sleek stand if you want you can wipe it off in the the wet or damp sponge if you don't have one of these sponges often a little paper towel will work so here's what it looks like let's zoom in on it a little wee bit better I'm going to put the iron down so here you can see that the tip is nicely tinned start way up here I have it about maybe a half inch 5/8 of an inch tin so this is perfect I will now be able to do a quality solder joint with this particular iron if I choose to use it you

Channel: 1929fordhotrod

Views: 1,192,695

Keywords: Soldering Iron, solder, How-to (Website Category), tinning a soldering iron tip, soldering iron maintenance, proper care of a soldering iron, flux, acid flux, 60/40 solder, before you start soldering, engineer, technologist, techinican, pcb soldering, electronic soldering, electronic assembly, tin lead solder, rosin

Id: 7PWmMxjXwYE

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2015