Soldering Crash Course: Basic Techniques, Tips and Advice!

this is a video that i've wanted to make for a long time a lot of the projects that i show on this channel involve some amount of soldering and i always try and give some tips and advice for the type of soldering that i'm doing in a particular project but even so it can be pretty intimidating if you've never touched an iron before and i always see some people in the comments saying that they'd love to do these projects but the soldering is what's holding them back so with those people in mind today i'm going to give a beginner's crash course in soldering and hopefully convince you that it's not as scary or as difficult to learn the basics as you might be thinking okay so here's what i'm going to do in this video first i'm going to go over some basic concepts and some common issues that i see people running into as they're learning how to do this then i'll go over some basic techniques for some different types of components that you're likely to run into as you get into this hobby then at the end i'll give some advice for things to look for in the soldering iron when you're going to buy one and some other tools that i'd recommend to go along with it as usual check out the link in the description for a blog post that's where i'll put links to any tools or supplies that i'll mention also if you have any questions or if you need any help with anything we've got a discord server and i'll link to that below as well okay so let's start with the very basics soldering is when you fuse together two electrical components using a metal alloy called solder and by the way yes i'm aware that most other countries pronounce the l in the word solder for whatever reason we decided not to in the united states wasn't my idea anyway that alloy comes in several formulas that are made up of metals like tin or copper or lead personally what i like using is 60 40 rosin core solder that means that it's 60 10 and 40 lead you can get it without lead but i find that a little bit more difficult to work with so if you're using one that has lead in it just make sure that you wash your hands after you're done it also comes in different diameters you can get really thick or really thin solder personally i prefer thinner because it makes it easier to fit inside pin holes and it also makes it easier to control how much you're applying rosin core means that the center of the solder is made up of rosin flux flux is another important component of soldering it's used for cleaning metal surfaces and removing oxidation and just getting them ready to accept solder and fuse with it there are a few different types of this as well some of them are very thin and basically evaporate as you work with them and some are thicker although those thicker ones can leave a sticky residue that is sometimes corrosive so you'll want to clean that off with some alcohol when you're done if you're using rosin coarse solder then in most situations you won't have to worry about using additional flux although you'll still want to clean off that residue that the rosin leaves behind flex can be especially useful for working with ribbon cables or tiny pads on a pcb because it'll facilitate better surface tension to sort of pull it onto the metal pads where you want it to go now a couple of common mistakes that i see people making when they're first starting out the first is that i'm trying to figure out what these people are thinking i think that the issue is a lot of people seem to think that the goal with soldering is to sort of melt the solder onto whatever you're trying to join together almost like you're squeezing icing onto a cake or something like that that's not the case instead what you're trying to do is heat up both of the things that you're trying to fuse together and then melt the solder into that might seem like a small distinction but it is incredibly important because if you do it the other way if you just kind of dribble the solder onto whatever you're working on first of all it's going to be really messy but you'll also run into what's called a cold solder joint that's where it might look like the two things are connected but it hasn't actually fused with one or both of those surfaces so you'll have an intermittent connection at best or at worst no connection at all the other issue that i see constantly the old saying less is more that definitely applies to soldering you only really want to use just enough solder to make the connection sometimes you'll have a good reason to use a little bit more for instance on the minty pie where the l r button board connects to the power board you should make those solder joints a little bit bigger because they're actually kind of physically reinforcing that connection between the two boards but the vast majority of the time you only want to use just enough to make that connection if you use too much solder then you run the risk of bridging whatever you're connecting with some neighboring components that can be really bad to say the least so i'll start with probably the easiest type of component to work with which is through-hole components you can find all kinds of different components in this form like capacitors and resistors and leds and they've got these long legs that are meant to go all the way through a circuit board you find these a lot in commercially made boards uh like these giant capacitors on this printer controller board for some of them you might have to bend the legs to make them fit into the board and i'm just using it with some prototyping board here just to give an example slide it into the pinholes and then bend the legs outward to hold it into place use the tip of your soldering iron to heat up both the pinhole and the leg at the same time and then feed a little bit of solder onto it a good temperature to start at with soldering by the way is between 300 and 325 degrees celsius and that's it like i say really easy to work with and you can see that i hardly had to use any solder at all that's kind of a theme that you'll be seeing here is only use as much solder as you actually need another type of through-hole soldering that i've shown a few times on this channel is attaching header pins to some type of board like this tiny arduino board from adafruit these make it so that you can stick it into a breadboard which makes it really easy to work with for prototyping so the easiest way to attach these is to put the header pins into the breadboard so that you have everything lined up and it'll also keep the legs perpendicular with the board and then just like in the other example use the tip of your soldering iron to heat up both the pinhole and the pin and feed a little bit of solder onto it for this one i'm using a little bit more than i did on the previous example and that's because these are going to be under a little bit of stress as you insert it and remove it from the breadboard so you want to make sure that it's got a nice solid connection i like to do one on both sides and then just go down the line and do the rest and this is about what it should look like when you're done you'll notice that the solder extends just a little bit up above the board and makes kind of a cone shape and i should probably go back and clean up all the excess rosin from the solder on this one so next up let's talk about wire this is the kind of wire that i like to use it's coated in silicone so it's nice and flexible and it's not going to melt from your soldering iron either it's also really easy to strip you can do it with your fingernail and this is stranded core wire meaning that it's made up of a bunch of tiny individual strands of metal you can also get solid core wire which as the name implies is made up of one giant thick piece of copper in the middle of the wire i have only needed to use this a couple of times it's much more difficult to work with 99 of the time you're going to be using stranded core wire so the first thing that i want to show you is tinning wires which is the process of adding a little bit of solder to it to make it much easier to connect to other components to do this strip a couple of millimeters of the wire and then twist all of those strands together nice and tight then you're going to heat them up and apply just a little bit of solder just to coat them and hold them all together and that's it this is something that you'll find yourself doing quite a bit so it's a good thing to practice next i'm going to show you how to splice two pieces of wire together which is again something that you'll probably find yourself doing at some point in the future there are a few different techniques for doing this but here's how i like to do it strip off about five millimeters of both sides of the wire twist the strands of wire together but don't add any solder to it just yet then after we're done we're going to need something to cover up the exposed wire i like to use heat shrink tubing so take a small piece of that and slide it over one of the wires obviously you want to do this before you connect them together now take both halves of the wire and twist them together nice and tight then just like with the tinning example heat up the wires and apply a little bit of solder again as you can see i'm not going crazy with the solder here just enough to coat both the wires you might want to trim it down just a little bit and then you can fold the exposed wire over so that it's parallel with the wires slide the heat shrink tubing onto the exposed part heat it up and that's it again this is probably something that you're going to find yourself doing as you get into this hobby so it's a good thing to practice sometimes you need to connect wires to pin holes like for example if you're connecting a battery to this charging board to do that first prep the pinhole by heating it up from one side with the soldering iron tip and feed a little bit of solder down into there then you're going to want to twist and tin the wire like i just showed you then heat up the pin hole and slide the wire in from the other side now in this example here i actually didn't feed quite enough solder down into there so i went back and added a little bit to the back this is about what it should look like when it's done as you can see the hole is completely filled but it doesn't stick out very much at all it's nice and smooth also notice that i don't really have any wire exposed on the top of the board here i inserted the wires all the way into the pinholes so that there's no metal exposed and you can't accidentally short something out sometimes you need to attach wire to a board that doesn't have pin holes so you'll be attaching them directly to pads on the board like with this retro psu board from helder really nice battery charging and boost port so anyway i'm going to be attaching a couple of wires to these battery pads here to add a jst connector to make it really easy to connect and disconnect a battery so first again strip a couple of millimeters of the wire twist it and tin it just like you've seen me do now in a couple of examples should look about like this when you're done some types of wire like this you need to be a little bit more careful with because they do melt unlike that silicone coated wire that i was using before then heat up the pads that you need to attach the wires to and feed some solder onto the board right at the tip of the soldering iron this is about what it should look like when you're done just a couple of nice smooth bumps that stick up maybe a millimeter or so then you can heat up those blobs of solder and just kind of insert the wire into them having them tinned beforehand makes it so that they should just kind of get absorbed into that blob of solder pretty easily notice that i only stripped as much wire as i needed beyond just keeping it nice and clean looking that's really important so that you make sure that you don't accidentally short something out somewhere another type of soldering that actually i'm not sure if there's an actual term for it but it's really popular with the types of projects that you see on this channel for example with kite's circuit gym for the sega dreamcast vmu shell anyway you'll see pads on a board that correspond with pin holes on a separate component in this case a raspberry pi zero and the goal is to melt solder down into the pinholes and onto the pads behind them thereby fusing the two boards together i've shown this technique with several different projects on this channel such as ampersand's null 2 project which made heavy use of it i'm actually a pretty big fan of that design because it lets you use cheap off-the-shelf components on top of a relatively simple inexpensive pcb we also use this technique in the minty pie to make it quite a bit thinner because we don't need any header pins the two boards are just fused directly together now this type of soldering is definitely a little more challenging but i really think that if you practice at it you can get the hang of it now a common mistake that i see with this type of soldering is that people try to just kind of drizzle solder down into those pinholes that is not going to work at all and you're just going to make a big mess instead like i mentioned earlier the goal is to heat up both the pinhole and the pad underneath it so you want to use a finer soldering iron tip that can actually reach down into the hole a little bit for this type of soldering don't go too thin though because then there's not enough surface area or mass to be able to transfer the heat onto the pinhole in the pad underneath it so anyway like i've shown in several previous projects what you want to do is put some solder down into the pinhole and then insert the soldering iron tip behind it stick it down in there for a few seconds to make sure everything gets heated up and then remove it quickly and if you did it right then there's a good chance that you'll see all the solder kind of settle down into the hole there for this type of soldering you're definitely going to want to have a multimeter so that you can check continuity between what you just soldered and wherever that pad leads to some projects like the null 2 and the minty pie will have test pads on them so that you can test continuity between each pin that you just soldered and that test pad if you find that you have not made a good connection uh then my kind of go-to trick for fixing those is to take a piece of wire heat it up and stick it down into the pinhole in question and you can kind of wiggle it around and hopefully get that solder to make its way down there onto the pad below it now you might be tempted to add quite a bit of solder to make sure that has a good solid connection but if you add too much then you run the risk of leaking solder onto neighboring pads underneath it so you need to be careful to add just the right amount of solder this can take some practice and there are actually some practice boards that i mentioned in a couple previous videos that helder designed and put up on osh park that you can go and purchase directly from them they're not very expensive and they've got test pads on them so it is worth getting a couple of sets of these and practicing on them if you're doing a project that uses this kind of soldering as i've mentioned in previous videos you can spend anywhere from a few dollars all the way up to several hundred dollars on a soldering setup and i don't necessarily recommend going to either of those extremes at the low end of the spectrum you're going to get an iron that you plug in and it heats up and that's about the only control that you have over it as you work your way up that spectrum you'll start to see nice features like interchangeable tips adjustable temperature and even hot air rework guns which can come in really handy this is the one that i've been using for a while now it's called the 853d it's got those features that i just mentioned it's also got a really handy feature which is a built-in dc power supply that you can adjust up to 15 volts super handy for working on small electronics projects like you see me doing on this channel it also has a usb power supply built in and a voltage meter as well it's also got a really nice feature where it'll go to sleep if you don't pick up the soldering iron for a while it'll lower the temperature until you pick it up again you can get it for about a hundred bucks on amazon and to me it's worth it but if you're looking for something a little bit cheaper the one that i used before this one is called the 898d it also has adjustable temperature interchangeable tips as well as a hot air rework gun you can get this one for about 60 dollars now a few additional tools that i'd recommend for getting started first you're definitely going to want to get a multimeter it's of course useful for checking voltages or measuring resistance but the thing that i use most often is a beeping continuity check to make it really easy to check and make sure that you've gotten a good connection next a set of helping hands i'm a big fan of quad hands but there are other cheaper ones on amazon that i'm sure probably work just as well i'd also recommend a couple of things for taking care of the tip of your soldering iron first a wire type tip cleaner like this one as you're working on a project you'll accumulate some build up on the tip one of these makes it so you can clean it off periodically while you're working on something the other thing that i recommend is a tip tenor and cleaner like this one right here basically when you're done working on a project you can stick the tip in there while it's still hot and then clean it off and your tip will look brand new when you put it away these tips do wear out over time but taking care of it like this will make it last a lot longer and then the other thing that i'd recommend is a silicone pad to do all your soldering on basically nothing sticks to them including solder it's not going to melt it if it drips on it and you can get them with these built-in trays to hold screws and things like that while you're working on projects all right guys well that's all that i wanted to cover hopefully this was helpful and hopefully it made it less intimidating to think about learning how to solder so that you can jump in and start doing the kinds of projects that i show on this channel again check out the blog post in the description for anything that i forgot or that i need to add and links to anything that i mentioned in this video as well as always a huge thank you to my patreon supporters that money goes towards paying for website hosting and tools and supplies and parts for new projects and things like that so again thank you i really appreciate that if you made it this far then thanks for watching and i will see you next time you

Channel: wermy

Views: 455,476

Rating: 4.9515324 out of 5

Keywords: Electronics, Soldering, DIY, Tutorial

Id: 6rmErwU5E-k

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Shesmytoasterstrudel]

It's not a question of wanting to solder, its a question of not wanting to solder and de-solder 100 switches into a one-run pcb whenever I have an urge to change clacks

[u/Black_Phoenix_JP]

Yes I would definitely learn from someone who holds the iron in the hot part instead of the handle...

Yes I know is just the still image from the and the video still probably is educational (didn't saw, I already know how to because is part of my living and there is a lot on the internet. The best one is from Dave Jones from EEVBlog) but still it undermines your credibility when doing errors like that in a how to video.

[u/NoSuchKotH]

That's a pretty solid video.

But I would like to add a few things:

Back in the past, when I learned soldering 30 years ago, when soldering through hole parts, the recommendation was to cut of the extra bit of wire before soldering and then, after soldering, pass the tip of the iron over the tip of the wire (where the copper is exposed) to coat it in tin. The reasoning was to minimize stress on the solder joint and to avoid oxidation running down the copper-tin border and break the joint after some years.

When you heat up solder, there should always be flux available. Either by the fresh solder you are putting there, or if you are reheating some joint, by the new flux you put there. Not doing so will lead to cold solder joints. (yes, the term is confusing)

When soldering wires, I would go directly in with the wire, then put some tin on. Not first tin, then wire. The reason is the above mentioned reheating of solder, but also that you are pushing solder out of the hole by pushing the wire in, potentially causing some tiny solder balls falling onto the PCB, get stuck there and causing shorts.

While I agree that leaded solder is easier to check for a beginner (if soldered correctly it gets a nice and shiny surface, which non-leaded solders do not) and have a slightly lower melting point. I would advice to use non-leaded solder for your health and the environment. Accumulation of lead in our soil and food is not fun and the big reason why Europe forbid using of lead in all commercial products almost 20 years ago.

In addition to the wire-type tip cleaner, get also a sponge. The sponge is to clean off excess solder (which you couldn't flick away), while the wire-type is to scrap off oxide that builds up on the tip.

Last but not least, if you are spending $120 for a Chinese soldering station, spend $150 instead for a quality Ersa or Weller one. The quality of the tip and uniformity of heating make them easier to work with and help you get better solder joints.