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Basic soldering is easy to improve with practice. A couple of hours with a few hundred assorted components and some scrap PCBs will help to perfect the steps (t

by DanBC 6y ago

Basic soldering is easy to improve with practice. A couple of hours with a few hundred assorted components and some scrap PCBs will help to perfect the steps (tin the bit, hold the bit to the joint, apply the solder, pull the solder wire away, pull the bit away, inspect the joint). Things are a little bit trickier today because the alloy of the solder and the flux you use do make a difference, but lead-free solder today is very good. Then practice with PVC insulated wire. The PVC insulation shrinks if it gets hot so this is good practice at speeding up. I looked through the NASA document and most of it is not advance technique. EDIT: people are saying "good tools" and I wanted to say a bit more about that. You can buy an iron for a few dollars from ebay. Don't use those. But almost any iron above that is going to be fine. I'd prefer to always be using Weller or Hako, but failing that any of the chinese no-name irons with temperature control are going to be good enough for most hobbyist projects. I love my Lindstrom and Bahco snips, but you can get good-enough cutters much cheaper. If this is something you're going to be doing all day every day you'll want to invest in the tools.

buescher 6y ago
I wouldn't give up my Metcal for anything else I've seen, but if I were broke, I'd buy one of the Chinese Hakko clones and eventually replace the tips with Hakko tips.
function_seven 6y ago
> Basic soldering is easy to improve with practice If you're looking for a practical way to do this, consider hand-wiring your own keyboard. I did this a couple years back, with 75 keys or so. With the diodes on each key, it was about 225 solder joints plus whatever extra to land the matrix leads on the microcontroller. Good variety, too. Some were wire-to-wire joints, others were wire wrapped around post, and a few where through-hole joints. If I look at the underside of that keyboard, I can tell where I started and where I finished by how clean the solder joints look :)

by DanBC 6y ago

buescher 6y ago

I wouldn't give up my Metcal for anything else I've seen, but if I were broke, I'd buy one of the Chinese Hakko clones and eventually replace the tips with Hakko tips.

function_seven 6y ago

> Basic soldering is easy to improve with practice If you're looking for a practical way to do this, consider hand-wiring your own keyboard. I did this a couple years back, with 75 keys or so. With the diodes on each key, it was about 225 solder joints plus whatever extra to land the matrix leads on the microcontroller. Good variety, too. Some were wire-to-wire joints, others were wire wrapped around post, and a few where through-hole joints. If I look at the underside of that keyboard, I can tell where I started and where I finished by how clean the solder joints look :)