How to Tin a Soldering Iron Tip or Re-tin an Old Soldering Iron Tip

This will be a brief demonstration on how to properly tin a

soldering

iron

or, if you have a used

soldering

iron

, how to properly maintain it. This is an example of a properly tinned soldering iron, as you can see the tip is nice and shiny and clean it up. it will provide good heat transfer to whatever we are soldering and because it is clean it will not contaminate what we are soldering. Here is an example of a soldering iron that is dirty and will contaminate whatever we are soldering and will probably need some water. It requires a little maintenance and needs to be monitored, so here's what I'll show you how to do.

In this video I will show you how to tin a new soldering iron before you start soldering or, if you have a used soldering iron, how to do it. To do a little maintenance to keep it working properly, in this demonstration I will explain how to properly care for and maintain your soldering iron tip. Tinning the tip is very important and with proper tinning you will be able to complete an excellent solder connection. on a circuit board or terminal before you start soldering with your new soldering iron or even if you have an old soldering iron, the tip of the soldering iron must be properly tinned.

Here are some of the things you'll need before you get started. You can start tinning the tap of your soldering iron. I tend to use plumber's soldering paste right here, 6040 tin lead solder, a damp sponge, now it should be damp, not soaked, some steel and a soldering iron stand and of course just your soldering iron. One of these soldering irons has a properly tinned tip, which would be this one here. You can see that it's nice and shiny and goes down to the middle of the tip. This tip here has a very worn shape and since it is a metal tip we cannot polish it.

Therefore, it must be thrown away. It seems there is hope for these two and they need to be canned properly. These are the two I'm going to work on and show you how to tin them. What we will do is what we will do. I'll pretend this soldering iron is a new soldering iron and the tip needs to be finished, so what I do is take my 60/40 tin lead solder and just wrap it with WRA around the tip, it doesn't matter which direction you wrap it. Whether you want to wrap it clockwise or counterclockwise, the effect will remain the same, but be sure to do this before plugging it in.

Here we are a couple of minutes later and you can see the solder is slowly liquefying and melting on the end of the iron. Then we'll let it continue for a few more seconds until everything melts. Now we're going to use the plumber's paste, so what I'm going to do now is very carefully clean the steel wheel. so you don't burn your fingers, dip it in the plumers paste, we'll send out smoke signals and then we'll melt some more solder on the end of the tip like this and again be careful not to burn your fingers, continue like this. with the solder until we get the end of the tip nice and shiny, coming slowly like this, keep cleaning it with the iron, oh, here we go, look at that starting to show, look how shiny it is on this side, but not so much of the other. the other side, so we'll dip it into the acid flux, this acid flux is only used for this purpose to tin the iron tin, this will make the tip last a little bit longer, there we go, so we have a perfectly tinned tip.

Zoom in on that so here we have a properly tinned tip and you can see it's properly plated all over the tip here and U this will help you give you or help you make a good solder joint once we start soldering on a board circuit or on terminals or whatever, so look, you have a soldering iron tip that looks like this, it's actually not tinned properly, so let's clean this up and make it look a lot better again. You don't want to put this. on a grinder or a wire wheel because it will destroy the tip and the only tips you can reshape are our pure copper tips, so what we'll do is put this in the soldering iron holder and heat it up first.

Well, I'm waiting for this soldering iron to heat up to maximum operating temperature, so I've got my 60/40 solder, my acid-base flux, and my steel wool, so we're going to have to wait a few minutes for this soldering iron to heat up. Heat it up and then we'll give it a spin and get it right T and rehab it while we wait for the iron to heat up. Let's talk a little about solder paste. Now this is an acidic soldering paste or plumbers fluxes. Use this routinely when soldering copper pipes. You can see we have some warnings that this is lethal and corrosive, so you have to be very careful when using this.

I like to use it alone to condition a weld. I can see that it looks a lot like automobile grease for your car. I find it to be the most effective when reconditioning a welder again. Make sure you use 640 solder and that it is a Rosen core. Here I am using A8mm or 032 inch diameter, this Rosen Cor solder is very much like a straw with flux or rosin in the middle, so let's see if this iron is hot enough to start reconditioning. What I'm going to do is I'm going to see if I can melt some solder on the end, oh yeah, there we go, so what I'm going to do is just clean it up a little bit with the steel that's here and I'm going to glue it back on.

Get it in here, let's keep cleaning it and then we're going to hit it with the solder and you're going to send a lot of smoke signals in here, so make sure you don't breathe in the fumes that uh. do this in a well ventilated area the goal of this is to get the whole tip nice and shiny there you have it okay be it a tiny little spot that you don't want there there we go we have it so there we have the very well canned tip, if you want you can clean it with the wet or damp sponge, if you don't have one of these sponges, often a small paper towel will work, so this is what it looks like, let's zoom in a little. a little bit better, I'm going to put the iron on the ground, so here you can see that the tip is nicely tinned on the top.

Here I have it like a 5/8 inch/2 inch can, so this is perfect, so I'm going to do it. I will now be able to make a quality solder joint with this particular iron if I decide to use it.