How To Build A Soldering Station

today in the smuggler room is about organizing our electronics we need some efficiency we need a damn

soldering

station

Hey, that's coming too aggressively. What's happening? Want some geeks? I'm Brian and welcome to the smuggler room this week, this chubby geek. It's about being efficient with electronics, specifically with all the tools we use when

build

ing electronics, we are about to go crazy on the electronics part of our living room

build

bench and I found that a lot of times I avoid working with electronics just because All the different components I need to solder and build tend to be difficult to assemble and are a mess when they come out.

A couple of years ago punished accessories posted an episode where they built a

soldering

station

and I really thought the overall design was super clever and would be really easy to use but I've really lacked the motivation over the last few years to sit down and do this. Another thing I've always been aware of is what Adam Savage talks about. untested and in his book about being aware of your opportunity and the tools you use or, more importantly, those that you avoid because they may be too hard to get out of the drawers, maybe they are stored in a strange place or taking them all out. you create a mess and you kind of avoid it and that's how I am with soldering, believe it or not, so today we're going to be inspired by the punishment accessories soldering station, the advice that Adam Savage shares and we're going to build a soldering station . that's absolutely geeky and ridiculous, let's do it now it's impossible to build a soldering station that has everything you're going to need, electronic projects have all kinds of tools and materials, but there are several elements that are typical of almost everyone and that's what I am planning to organize here soldering iron tip cleaner, soldering wire, helping hands, electrical tape and fans, they are all things that I thought would be one hundred percent necessary, besides that, I will have to think about how it is going to be placed All this.

I've been making a few different designs with this soldering station. The idea is not for it to be portable, like you would take it in your vehicle and go somewhere, but semi-portable for what I do here, so I can move it around different places. places in the store, I could actually take it to the basement if we're working there or wherever I'm working. I have an area for all the little alligator clips where the fans can be installed and powered. a board that can be plugged in here that we can make mockups with and then room for the soldering iron and as we go up I'll have places for the wire and the solder and all that.

I even have a way to incorporate this rubber mat here. on a board that can then be moved, it can be used to configure some of the electronic components. The biggest issue is not making this so big that it's cumbersome, making sure the area is set up for the best workflow. This occurs to me right here. It is a cabinet scraper or card scraper and turns out to be one of the best small tools. It has many uses: cleaning glue, removing small pieces of material to level it, etc., it's just one of those great ones. things you should have in your arsenal, so what I'm doing in a build like this I can sometimes get into my own head and as I make it up things get overlooked or aren't quite right, so , what happened here?

I was building this bracket that would eventually hold all the fans and as I was doing it I realized I was hiding the power strip behind all the fans. I thought it was a good idea to hide the power strip, but the reality is that's how it would be. It would be nice to have a power supply up front and accessible while you're working on the electronics because you need power so I went ahead and took this off and slid it to the back now that we have some imperfections we're going to take care of all of that and cover it up nice and ordered, but Now the fans will return almost behind the wall where we want them and we will have access to the energy.

One of the key elements of this build is helping hands, which is what you see here, they are incredibly valuable. and I wanted them front and center, of course we're going to have to find a way to disguise it a bit and why not a droid interface in the center. I found the fans to be a critical aspect. I spent too many years breathing. and dust and in this case fumes and as much as I am a Darth Vader fan, I really don't want to end up needing a full mask to sustain life, so adding something like ventilators to help me keep my lungs clear seemed like a no-brainer, remember that workshop safety is really important for your health and to keep you building for years to come, so I tried to film the electronics section of this wiring the fans and LEDs and it was a little messy, so I think.

I'll save myself the mess and have a clearer way to show you this with a diagram. First we need to identify all the components, we have power fans, LEDs and finally our switch. My switch is called a push button rocker switch, at least that's what it is. listed on Amazon and I hate the name, push buttons and switches have different functions but we will get to that in the electronics series, this switch has three terminals for power, ground and ACC, so let's start by connecting the ground from the power supply feeding. the negative of the LED, the switch and the fan, then we will connect the power supply to the HCC terminal of the switch and finally from the power terminal of the switch to the fans and LEDs.

Now keep in mind the LEDs I'm using in this project are rated up to 12 volts, which is the power rating the power supply is also rated at, as you'll want to measure the power supply just to be sure. I don't normally trust labels and you want to make sure before you connect the power, that's it, wired and ready to go, let's get back to the build, let's do some assembly and details on this guy. Now there are many ways you could build a wire spool holder. We take advantage of our laser cutter. and I made a couple of brackets that held an aluminum rod that we could use in place and that could also be easily removed so we could put the wire spools on and off.

I came across a pretty interesting little technique. I was able to grab a towel. and rub it on the aluminum paint to create a brushed aluminum surface on this acrylic. Now this would take some refinement and more practice, but I think this has the potential to really become a nifty technique that you can add to create brushed aluminum. Finally I wanted to point out that yes, we used the laser cutter a lot to create a lot of the details on this, but do you need a laser cutter to make this project? No, what we hope is that you see the potential of putting all your welding tools into it. or at least most of them in one place where it's easy to work on things and save them.

In fact, you don't even need all the geeky stuff we did for this, although I highly recommend that part. Now it's time for all of you to take out some of that scrap material, get out your soldering tools and build your own soldering station because we want to see it, we want to see how much you love building something from nothing.