Beginner's Guide to Soldering Electronics

This is a

beginner

's

guide

to

soldering

electronic components, so if you're thinking about trying

soldering

or if you've tried it and aren't very happy with the results you're getting, this video is for you. I'm going to go over all the equipment you'll need, like a soldering iron and flux, and the important functions of all of these items. I'll also go over some soldering techniques to make sure it's clean and tidy. unions every time I think I want to mention is the pronunciation of the words solder some parts of the world say solder some parts of the world say solder there is an argument for each of those pronunciations based on the etymology of the word, but in the end At the end of the day, as long as we all know we are talking about the same thing, it doesn't really matter, a basic principle of any type of soldering is Dabangg, two things put together using solder as glue, soldering electronic devices has the additional requirement that that joint must be conductive of electricity, so if you look at the equipment requirements, will you need a soldering iron?

They now come in a variety of different shapes, sizes and prices. You can get them for just a few dollars and you can spend thousands on one. The cheapest type soldering iron usually has the main power cord coming straight out of the back of the soldering iron, it usually doesn't have any type of temperature control and if you're lucky with those cheap ones you might have a replaceable tip on the next one. passed. The best thing about that is to use a soldering station which usually has a temperature controlled base station and then the iron connects to that base station and the soldering stations usually also have replaceable tips and some of the best ones can be reasonably priced. .

There are also a variety of different types of tips. My recommendation for this type of work is to use a soldering station. I mean, they are a little more expensive than the basic soldering IDE, but you can get them for pretty cheap and it's much better. having that temperature control on the soldering station and like I say in general you'll probably end up with better quality and finer tips on a soldering station, I now use a retail hakko fx-888. for about five hundred dollars here in Australia, but I'm pretty sure you can get them for under 300 in the US.

They have the worst interface, but what I really like about them is that you can remove the tips in the middle. of solder, so if we take a look here, I can lift that up and remove that tip even when it's hot. The difference with this soldering station is that the entire tip is the actual heater, whereas on some of the cheaper soldering stations the heater is in the handle and then you just have a little bit of the tip that just sits on the back. top of that heater and the heater transfers the heat to that tip now because these actually have the heater on the tip itself, which has been a much more effective heat. transfer but it's only this final tip that gets hot, the base stays cool so you can't swap them out while you're in the middle of a soldering job and I usually only use three tips when I'm soldering and they're just three different sizes of beveled edge tip and I generally don't really like conical tips, which are the pointy ones, put the pointed type, which is a shame because most soldering stations come with a conical tip as standard and some They only have the option of a tapered tip, there aren't even chisel tips available for them, so this is one of the things I really like about the HECO station.

There are now a wide variety of tips available although the hakko is the soldering station I use. Use it every day. I won't be using it for this demo. I'm going to use this POS soldering station that I bought at my local

electronics

store for 2995 and the reason I'm going to use this is because I want to show that it's more about technique than the equipment you're using now. I've never used this soldering station before, in fact I didn't even take it out of the box, so it could be very interesting, so when it comes to the temperature I use for my soldering station, I usually set it around 400 degrees Celsius, which is approximately 750 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now the melting point of leaded solder is about 180 degrees Celsius, so 400 may seem a little high, but the point is. that I'm not just looking to melt the solder, I want to be able to transfer the heat from the solder to whatever I'm soldering, which is why I have that temperature a little higher if I were working with lead-free solder I'd probably be looking at around 450 degrees C or 850 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm not too picky about it, close enough is good enough for me okay, so I've got my little soldering station set up right? It's cute, it's got a little tip on the end, we'll see how that goes, so the next thing I'm going to do is go over solder and flux and the relationship between the two, so I'm just going to go over to the microscope here and yeah look here, I have a piece of solder here, this is just from a roll of solar energy and if you look here, I take a scalpel and I put ice through the In the middle, you'll see when we open it up that inside it will expand a bit, there's a little flux channel inside and so there's actually flux inside this solder, which is the flux there and that you just received. an indication of how important flux is in the soldering process, the fact that the solder actually has flux in it now, the purpose of flux is basically to help stop the oxidation process or the oxidation process depending on where of the world is found.

It's how it's pronounced, so any type of medal, I mean, you would be familiar with it, obviously, when the metal rusts, that's the oxidation process and the solder also rusts and I can actually prove that here I'm going to grab my soldering iron and I'm going to let myself zoom out a little bit here. I'm going to melt some solder into the iron like this, okay, there's a nice shiny metallic mass of solder there, now we let it sit. I was going to grab a pair of tongs here for a little longer, let it sit and it'll start to get this tapered crust on the outside.

You can see there's a little bit of film as we move it around, it's like you can see all of these. Right now we're getting all these really ugly shapes on top of it and this is all part of that oxidation process as the oxygen reacts with that metal you start to get this film on the outside and all of a sudden that weld is very difficult. work with it, it's not going to do what you want because in order for the solder to stick to what you want to solder, both surfaces have to be really very clean and that includes making sure they're not oxidized, so the flux basically helps, yeah , in that process by stopping the oxidation of that metal in the soldering iron or whatever you're welding to, that solder will stick much more easily.

Now I'm going to get back to that. a little bit in a moment because I'm just going to demonstrate that to you for that process, but I just want to talk about solders and flux, so solders here basically come in two different varieties and now they're Leonard and lead free. Actually this is a lead solder, it has 60%, 10 and 40% lead, obviously, as we know, lead is a very poisonous substance, so it is better not to have lead, having said that lead solder It has a slightly lower melting temperature, so it may actually be a little easier to work with and that's one of the reasons I tend to work with lead solder, although I'm trying to convince myself of that, so if you are going to use lead solder, it is very important that you have plenty of it. very good ventilation.

I have some kind of air filter. It is not the best type of air filter. It's better than nothing, but one of the things I tend to do is what I'm working on. I have a fan back here. Me and I just turned it on, so there's a puff behind me and, you know, getting any of those fumes away from me, this shop I'm in has pretty good ventilation, so yeah, obviously, taking that into account. If you are going to use solar energy with lead, it is somewhat poisonous. If you are going to use lead-free solder, you should keep in mind that it has a higher melting point, so your soldering stations will need it.

I have a little. more at a higher temperature to melt the solder so now next up is the flux and again fluxes come in a couple of varieties and they usually come in active and passive varieties active solid this is an active flux here this one is called The liquid of soldering for bakers and the reasons why: As an activity, it's acidic, it's corrosive and so it's actually removing a layer of the metals that you're using when you're soldering, but the downside is if you don't clean it. This keeps corroding, so if you're working on this with

electronics

, you can come back a week later and find that it's eaten all the wires and then it won't be any good. all so I would recommend staying away from this for electronics.

Once upon a time, I didn't realize there was anything more than this and this is all I used, but there are so many different types of flux, so someone else thought you could find something like this, which is a rosin flux and This is a passive flux and what that means is that it's not corrosive in the same way as the active flux, so if you leave it on whatever you're soldering, it's not going to eat the components, still not bad, not bad idea to clean these things after using them and of course again these things like all other things in this hobby are poisonous so you have to be careful.

Make sure you wash your hands or use protection or any other different type of flux sold that you have. This is one that I use regularly, it is Ametek NC 5 v 9 v 2 TF and it is another of the passive type fluxes and it is a gel. and again, this is one that you don't actually have to clean after using it, it's not a non-corrosive type and I say this is the one I prefer to use, but it's a little bit more expensive, so what I'm doing. What I'm going to do now is take just a small breadboard, this is a breadboard here, it's just a kind of breadboard for prototyping in electronics and if we look at it under the microscope you'll see that it's lots and lots of little holes with little circles of little copper rings and those copper rings are for the solder to adhere to.

Now, what I'm going to demonstrate here, I'm just going to take a larger mass of solder. I'm going to continue with this little weld on something like that and then I'm going to run it through some of these holes here? Now what you can see is that solder is freezing, it's not flowing particularly well and you know. ending this guy in a pretty disgusting way and you might think well why you're doing that anyway. Well, I want to show you the difference of doing this when we use some flux, so now I'm going to take some flux, I'm going to grab it and go to a nice clean set of holes here, yeah, and I'm going to put a big mess , a mess of this flow into these holes, lots of hopes and hopes, and the reason I'm using so much is because I want to prove this point, now I'm going to grab there's a wrong sob.

Sorry, I'm going to grab a whole stack of solder like this on the end of the soldering iron and now I'm going to do the same thing I did last time, I'm going to pass you over here and what you can see, you can see what happens here when I use that flux. We ended up with a row of really nice, neat little spots instead of this guy. from the mess I ended up with earlier and obviously those stains are much cleaner and tidier now. I'm not necessarily saying to do what I just did using loads and loads and loads of flux and nothing else, but it shows you what a difference there is when using flux when you're soldering because of the way it stops oxidation and helps namely that the solder flows and forms into nice little blobs, rather than some kind of big streaky mess, so the next thing I want to talk about is maintaining your soldering iron and the main thing is to make sure the tip is kept clean.

Now some people use sponges with water, but what I would recommend is something like this, it's a little small. container that's full like a steel wool and you basically get the tip of your soldering iron and you just stick it into that little metal mesh and that will clean that tip or remove any excess solder and just keep that tip looking good. nice and clean so my recommendation is to use one of these. In fact, you can get replacements for these when they become old and worn out. Just take it out, throw it in the trash and put a new one in, so that's basically what I use.

Keep the tip of my soldering iron clean and tidy. The other thing I just wanted to mention quickly is something that I'm going to use in the next part, which is heat shrinkable and heat shrinkable is basically a wide variety of plastics that they come in. a range of different sizes and colors and you can use this to seal any joints you might make so you can do it if rather than leaving any type of joint exposed when you joincables, the heat shrink covers, which means that the joints are going to last a lot longer, these things, you can buy them from electronics retailers, you can buy these things on eBay very cheap and, like I say, this is a box with a lot of different sizes that I It has lasted a long time.

I have to say what I'm going to do. Now I'm going to attach a wire, so this is a wire that has come and you know, been cut and I'm just going to jump from here to the microscope. You can see it's really ugly. cut that happened here and we want to repair it and put them together now for what I'm going to do here. I'm going to use one of these, which is a little hinged stand that bends and has little alligator clips on it. This lets you know to keep whatever you're working with in a nice, stable position because often when you're soldering, you have one hand on the soldering iron, you have one hand on the soldering. and then you run out of hands to hold what you really want to work on, so that's where things like this come in handy.

You can also have these supports if you are working on circuit boards. It's also things like this, like a little spit that allows you to put the board in and then you can put it in there and you can turn the board around to work on it and keep it nice and still, so they're pretty useful as well, that depends on the job. What are you going to do, the first thing I'm going to do with this cable is clean up these cuts because they are disgusting, so I'm just going to cut it. a little bit and I take this one and I'm going to cut it a little bit so now we have two nice clean ends and then I'm going to use a wire stripper like this one here, a really very basic one that just allows me to put this in the right size hole that's similar there and then just strip the wire, so let me go there, strip the wire there, let's do the same thing with the other one, strip that wire, okay, yeah, just go. to just give the wire a little twist like this, so just hold those little pieces of why the little pieces of wire are together, okay, now I want to join these two wires together, now you could say, okay, we'll put those two wires together. together and throw some solder on them, that's usually not what I do when I'm soldering items like this.

What I like to do first is solder the two things I'm planning. I'll join them together and then melt them, so let's start with that. I'm going to put this cable on the stand and I'm going to go there, we're good and focused. Then I'm going to solder this wire a little bit. Now here is one of the most important parts of the technique and this is the mistake that a lot of people make when they start soldering and the mistake they make is that they melt the solder on the tip and then they try it. and transferring that solder to the wire, that is not at all the way to do it, what you need to do and this is where that flux that is inside the solder is really important because that flux that is inside a solder only works at the moment in which it is melting, so once you melt it on your tip, that flux has done its job and is of no further use to you, so you really need to make sure what flux is being used when the solder is melting, so What do you need to do?

The correct procedure is to use the soldering iron to heat the wire, so you are using the actual soldering iron to heat the wire instead of melting the solder, let me clean this tip a little bit, it looks a little ugly, okay? so I'm going to put it there and then what you do is you use the solder and then you melt the solder on the wire, not on the tip, as you can see by burning the smoke that comes out, which is actually the flux and that shows you that that flux is doing its job and as you can see now, it's completely covered with solder, even if it's a little bit out of focus, it's completely covered with solder and it's ready for us to make a joint, so let's go ahead and do that one again with the other wire, so let's take this second wire here and again, we're just going to focus it as best we can once again, solder goes to the wire, try to get the top wire as hot as possible. possible and then melt the solder on the wire, there we go and then any excess that ends up on the tip, you just have to clean it with your little love tip, wipe the Misha tip cleaner on there, so now we have I have two pieces of wire They have solder on them, so the next thing I'm going to do now is actually they're ready to be joined, but if we were, this would just be a piece of this is a piece of wire that's not connected to anything for the purpose of this. demonstration, but imagine for a second that it was attached to something on each end, so the next thing we would do is get ready by getting our heat shrink because once it's attached, if it's attached on both ends you can't heat shrink it, so what we do is we take some heat shrink and now get the size that you want, a size that is as close to the thickness of the wire as possible, so if we just go down here, so this is pretty good, actually no, this one is go a little, it's a very tight fit.

I think it would probably be fine, but I'd rather go a size up, maybe a size bigger than that, just to make a little bit of a difference. It's a little bit easier for that to move around on the wire, so let's try this one, so it's a cut and you can see that one fits pretty well there, okay, so I'm just going to cut a little bit of this off. Don't know. I need everything, that's too long. I want a piece that's about the length of this joint plus the same amount on each side, so the joints will be this big and then if we go that same amount on each side.

I'm probably going to look, I would say it doesn't have to be precise, but I'm going to choose a length of about an inch long or maybe about an inch, three inches, so there's a There's a little bit of a nice chunk. of heat shrink there and then what you do is you slide it over one of the pieces of which it doesn't matter which one, but you just want to make sure you keep it reasonably far away. of the joint itself because when this wire gets hot, if you cause the heat to melt, it will shrink prematurely, which we don't want, okay, so now I'm going to put the wire right on top.

I said I'm going to put the cable in this holder. I'm going to use both sides of this holder of these alligator clips so I can hold both in position for soldering now, you might not want to use them, you know, you have both in the holder, you might only want one. but for what I'm demonstrating here I'm going to put them both on the stand. I'll have to turn it here. We have two cables ready to join. They both have some solder on them so I don't really need them. More solder, but if I wanted, I could take a little bit here at the same time to melt them and then I took the wrong soldering iron again.

Let's try this one and then we apply heat to the area and then we just melt them. two together let's look at it okay so obviously making sure it cools don't separate them too soon otherwise the solder won't cool but here you can see it cools and solidifies and now we have a nice neat neat joint there and you'll find that that joint is probably stronger than the cable itself if you were to actually grab them and pull them apart it would probably break somewhere else before it broke at that joint okay so next thing What I have to do is apply that heat shrink, so I have my jaw here, let me, Pat has to join me and then I have the heat shrink on top, now let's jump, I think it's going to be easy to look at this camera for this, so that's the bond there and that's it now when it comes to shrinking heat shrink, you can do it a few ways.

Sometimes I use a hot air rework station that blows out hot air or you. You can use a heat gun, but you can use a little bit lighter if you want, so if I grab this, I just gently run the heat back and forth, you can see that makes the shrinkage, the heat shrinkage, shrink. I also put a full stack of Blackburn in it because I'm using a lighter. It's not the cleanest way to do it, but it works, like I say. Normally I would use some sort of hot air rework station and what that does. is that the heat shrinks it to its size and then once it cools it hardens and if we go back to our microscope you can see that my lighters melted the wire there a little bit, but the most important thing is that it is now sealed, so which you know, it's kind of a nice, clean, neat joint that you can have on whatever you're working with and it's not going to come apart because it's all sealed and it's not likely to ever corrode, so that's basically it That's, you know, just demonstrating how to join with a wire, let's say the most important part is to make sure you heat up what you want to solder and then melt the solder on the component or the part that they're on. solder instead of on the iron, okay, so the next thing we're going to do is demonstrate how to solder a component onto a board and I'm going to do that by just taking a little nondescript resistor here, come on, this.

It's a resistor, this is the board that I'm going to mount it on, so if we look at this, we can see all the little holes here and let's say I was building an electronic kit or something, so basically been in the container, the pins of the resistor, turn this off here so you can bend the resistor pins here and then push them through the holes on the board, so okay, so that's a resistor sitting on the board. Every once in a while, on this side, I would usually grab, you know, a pair of pliers or something and just gently, not hard, but just gently grab it like this, pull it a little bit, bend it, and then grab it.

This side, it pulled a little. and bend it, those curves now keep it from falling out, so it's going to stay in place while we do the soldering there, kind of why it's bent there, so let's jump into the microscope now and take a look. why number one and why number two and now I'm going to just solder these wires into place so we're going to start with this one and I'm going to take my trusty soldering iron and again apply heat to the components that you want to solder and then melt them down. those components now, this is where I was really referring to the difference between a tapered tip and a chisel tip.

Now if I show you a chisel tip, I'll show you a big chisel tip, but it's just for the purpose of doing a demonstration, this is a chisel tip and you can see that you have a big flat surface and what I like about these is that you can apply them like this and apply a large area of ​​heat on any board you can. I'll be working, but with the fine point tip like this you have more trouble getting the heat where you want it to go now, what you could do is maybe lay it down to get a little more surface area out of the iron.

Let's know what you're trying to solve, so anyway I'm going to hold that that's applying a little bit of heat to the pad and the wire and then I'm just going to grab this and melt it and melt it. the pad and then to the cable and there we go and as you can see we've got a nice neat little spot there and then it's just a matter of cutting off the excess of that cable so that's it and there you have it. There's a nice clean solder joint there, I'm just out there, looking very clean and neat, so let's do it again on the other end, so we've got the soldering iron, we clamp it to the copper pad. and we also clip it to the wire to try to transfer heat to both of them and then we just get the solar energy, melt it and it melts on the pad and also on the pin, so there we go with another nice, clean and neat one. ball cut off the excess there we go once again, another kind of clean and tidy ball, now I've done it without any flux other than the flux that was in the solder, so what I would recommend with that is, you know, type I'd probably use things like a breadboard like this for practice, try and practice getting good spots when you're soldering like this and keep in mind that I'm using a 29.95 soldering station here so it's not just about having fancy equipment in there . come on, nice and beautiful little blobs of solder, I recommend some kind of practice, so that's basically it for this, since I'm a

beginner

.

I'll probably do another video later that explains some more advanced soldering, so maybe you already know how to solder some ICS. on boards or know some smaller components, but just as a basic

guide

for beginners, that's pretty much all I wanted. Wanted to show, feel free to leave comments or if there is anything else you would like me to show you, just send a request. and I'll see what I can do thanks for watching