Soldering for a Rookie

So, okay I've been doing some experimenting on my own to try and teach myself some skills. I have an old soldering gun and a wand and quite a bit of silver solder, some with a rosin core - I soldered the bare ends of a little copper wire together, no problem ( I think, it looks okay) but then I tried to solder the same bare wire to a copper pipe and it beaded up on the wire, or rolled right off.

I'm using flux, and touching the solder to the gun and letting it run right off,
What are the rules in general to hobby soldering? In this case, what should I be doing if I want to (eventually) run an LED light from a simple copper battery case? Anything would be helpful, I'm learning!

This is the gun I have,
not this brand , but basically the same thing with the light in front
http://www.electronicsnmore.com/images/j-100.gif

and one of my dads old soldering wands from way back when.

thanks for any help!

Firstly, rough up the area of the pipe that you want to attach the wire to with some sandpaper (or steel wool)

Place the wire so it's touching the pipe (support it with something so you don't need to hold it) and stick a blob of flux over the connection

Press the soldering iron down on top of the wire pressing it against the pipe, the flux will melt and clean the joint. The pipe needs to get to an acceptable temperature too, so hold it there for a bit

Now for the important part. Don't touch the solder to the soldering iron, feed it directly into the join. If you just touch it to the iron and the join isn't hot enough, it will bead up like you described. If you've heated up the area enough, you'll get a good solid joint

Good luck

Thank you very much! Heat was my thing I guess, I'll keep on learning.

So, it's much like soldering plumbing pipe, where you heat up the joint/flux and bring the solder to the joint as well, good to know. I've heard different things form different people, but this makes..oh god it makes so much more sense haha, understanding what's happening really helps.

cleaning the metal and the proper flux will go a long ways to make the solder flow easier. And always heat the metal not the solder and let the solder run towards the joint. And try not to breath the fumes.

thd9791 said:

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Thank you very much! Heat was my thing I guess, I'll keep on learning.

So, it's much like soldering plumbing pipe, where you heat up the joint/flux and bring the solder to the joint as well, good to know. I've heard different things form different people, but this makes..oh god it makes so much more sense haha, understanding what's happening really helps.

No probs, if you haven't done much soldering it's only natural to touch the solder to the iron given it's the hottest thing.

The simplest way I can put it is, the iron is there to heat the joint enough so that the solder will melt on the joint itself

Also, when you come to solder components, such as LED's, capacitors or transistors, look into soldering heat sinks. It is possible to burn out the components while soldering them if you don't have something to protect them

What type of soldering are you planning on? Personally, I would not use that for electronics. Soldering wires together it is good, soldering integrated circuits to a circuit board is going to be difficult.

Sent from my Etch-A-Sketch

NormanF said:

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What type of soldering are you planning on? Personally, I would not use that for electronics. Soldering wires together it is good, soldering integrated circuits to a circuit board is going to be difficult.

Sent from my Etch-A-Sketch

Oh yes, sorry. If you're soldering to a circuit board, you're not going to have to hold the soldering iron there for long, it will heat up very quickly

As for IC's, personally I like to use the little IC sockets you can buy. Means you're not heating up the IC itself and therefore it is impossible to burn it out

EDIT: Or do you mean the fact that he has a soldering gun? He did say he has an iron too

this is a great skill to learn and I too was inexperienced until just recently and all the advice given here is exactly to keep in mind. I built a 1:1 R2D2 and had some components and about 200 LEDs to solder to PCB boards... very tiny and close together... it didn't take long to get the hang of it but as stated before use IC sockets (also great if the IC goes bad you can just pop it out and replace without any further soldering) and when doing LEDs especially if there are a lot of them get in and out quickly so as not to burn out the LED.
every few solder hits you will want to clean off the tip of the soldering gun too.

great valuable tips here guys!

all of this is great! Ironically, I'm not even touching a circuit board, if anyone is familiar with the little john long phaser and it's interior, that is a future project of mine. There is no circuit board, just a couple wires, a hand bent battery housing out of copper sheet and a little LED. (and a little switch thing..stacked tiny bits of copper that bend and touch when the dial is rotated....The rest is soldering little bits of metal together to form the dial/light mechanism and JB weld/epoxying a lot of things. all skills I will be learning

Sparkfun has a great tutorial on soldering:

Beginning Embedded Electronics - 6 - SparkFun Electronics

Hint - if you do go into electronics... even just soldering wires to an LED, you want to prevent too much heat going into the electronic part. As was mentioned, you should use a heat sink to protect the part. Now for the hint... small Alligator Clips are very cheap and make perfect heat sinks for electronics work.

+1 for all the insight already given. I've been soldering for more than 30 years now, learned how to do it by desoldering parts off old components when I was 5 or 6. Great practice technique, just grab an old radio, computer or TV circuit board and a solder sucker (this is your best friend) and remove parts then try to put them back on with good joins. It won't take long. With electronics, a "dry joint" in one component can stop the whole thing working so you want a good flow without overdoing the solder or the heat.

Also helps to clean the end of your soldering iron off with a knife blade or a file before each use, to remove any slag from the flux burnt onto there. I do this during heat up time. Sure, you wear your tips out sooner but tips are cheap, it does improve the work quality considerably and helps with heat transfer.

It also pays to have different sizes and grades of solder on hand. I have some thin stuff for fine work, some fatter 3 or 5 core fluxed solder for larger electronics or car wiring and then the really fat rods for metalwork that needs a flux or soldering fluid. I also keep silver solder close by too, some things just seem to join better with this plus if you are going to paint something, this is better than lead solder. I also use different irons from a small (modified) standard iron for general and precision woork to a gas burner one for bigger stuff.

It pays to remember you can solder a lot more than just electronics or brass and copper. I soldered a steel nut onto a brass fitting the other day for something I'm working on, using standard electronics solder, many people are under the misaprehension than you can't solder steel but if your surface is good and the heat is right it works very well. Not something that can be done with an electric iron though, usually needs gas to generate enough heat. You can also get rods for aluminium too.

The advice I give people is to use a good quality soldering station, that monitors and controls the temperature. It doesn't have to be super expensive, as I used a $40 Weller station for years when I was younger, with great results.

Always tin your iron before use (I normally have some thicker solder that I use for tinning, and pretty thin .020 rosin core solder for all small components).

It is a pretty easy skill to learn and get good at. I do tons of surface mounted devices by hand with a soldering station, and even that was quick to learn.

Good luck!

Ive learned soldering by doing some plumbing work on my own house. I have applied this to my propbuilding skills when i made my stock for my pulse rifle. I used a torch and solder to fill the gaps when I made my 90 degree bends.

awesome, thanks guys. As of now, I think the biggest problem I had was heating up the parts. When it's something bigger than wires and a board, I'm not quite good at getting the solder/flux to adhere or even melt sometimes. I understand the heat is the trick here

Usually for soldering larger parts like copper plumbing you use a blow torch.

Clean the joint, add flux, assemble pieces, heat joint with a blow torch and feed solder into the joint.

pfillery said:

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clean the end of your soldering iron off with a knife blade or a file before each use

I don't recommend this, it will ruin your soldering tips, which are expensive if you buy good ones.

It is important to have a clean tip, but you should do this by tinning the end as selgus suggests.


As for learning to solder I started with kits like these. They come with a custom pcb and all the parts you need, all you do is drop the pieces into place and solder them. It's nice to have something useful at the end and you might even learn a little about how the circuit works (although thankfully that's not necessary to build it).