This set of videos from eevblog worked for me.
Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
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Re: Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
#32If you need to remove components with many pads, like connectors, it can be daunting without Low Temp Solder Wire. Chip Quik.
Btw, I use acetone for cleaning PCBA's, and actually almost every day, and right now, in a professional R&D lab. Residues of soldering wire, after SMT component removal, before new component gets in - it goes away with cotton bud soaked in ace in a few strokes. Never destroyed anything in my whole professional life, 35+ years now, working in consumer and industrial PCBA repair service. Isopropyl works of course, but slowly, and not so clean pcb stays. Depending on the type of soldering wire. I never use lead-free for repairs.
During soldering though hole, you need few seconds to heat up the pcb copper and a component lead. They should be on on the same temp for second or two when solder gets melted around. You can even see pad hole capillary sucking melted solder.
I've seen young people soldering THT, by shortly touching component pin and and a pcb pad. This looks baad.
Re: Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
#33The main insight you need to have:
The things you want to solder need to be at a minimum temperature for the solder to properly flow.
Parts with a lot of metal attached to it will need more time to get hot. Most notorious are pads connected to a large (ground) plane.
If the solder does not flow properly because of this, increase the time of contact between your soldering iron and the items, add a small amount of solder to the tip to increase contact area. Or use a heat gun in your other hand or a preheater. Or buy a soldering iron with more power.
Flux will help too.
Use a fan to draw the fumes away from you, at a minimum. If you do this on a daily basis, get a fume extractor.
There are many more tips on the internet. The first thing I mentioned is the most important one, imho.
Re: Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh I forgot... a big magnifier glass (8x to 15x) with an LED light is way cheaper than a microscope and very helpful for small parts soldering (SMD) :-)
A cheap clip-on macro lens for a phone camera is also good for inspecting things, without the cost+space of a proper microscope.
True but you can do actual work under a stereoscopic microscope. It has a vaunted place on my workbench.
Disclosure: Old person. ;-)
Re: Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
#35The variables aren't that hard to learn. The one thing many beginners struggle with is that they don't really get the principles involved. They treat a soldering iron as some sort of heated paint brush and wonder why they can't get the paint off the brush.
In reality there are multiple factors at play, but a simple and useful abstraction is to think about solder as something that flows more easily to places that are hot. That means the solder always likes to go onto the iron, since that is likely the hottest thing around.
This means your first goal is simply to heat up the places you want to solder far enough so they can melt the solder if you touch them with the solder wire¹.
This usually means heating two things at once: be it two wires you solder together or a pad and the leg of a resistor. That means knowing the geometry of your tip well is useful: How to wedge it in to heat the two things at once. Typically only the shiny, plated bits of the tip are really good at conducting heat². A little drop of solder on the iron can help conduct the heat to a bigger surface, a bit like the fat in a frying pan.
But generally you heat the parts with the iron and then you feed the solder wire into the parts. If they are hot e ough, the solder melts. If not, you wait.
The solder wire typically has a resin-like fluid inside, that helps with soldering as it reduces the surface tension of the metal (this is most of the stuff in the fumes). Capillary effect is the main thing that makes solder flow where you want it to. When the flux is evaporated soldering gets harder, so you may need to add fresh solder after a while or you use flux from a dispenser that you add manually.³
Then there is a lot about logistics. Heated air travels up, on earth solder tends to be affected by gravity and has a tendency to go down (although capillary effects are really the dominant force here), gravity affects parts, wires bend where their material wanta them to etc. The logistics part means: you have only two hands, an iron, solder wire and typically two or more parts that need to be joined.
Being good at soldering is (1) having a good mental model and intuition about how and why the solder flows the way it does and (2) have skill and experience to get the logistics right. The first you can learn to understand, the latter is a matter of practise.⁴
I have thought soldering sucessfully to well over 400 people during the past decade.
¹ This means your iron and tip need to be able to deliver enough heat to heat the parts. If you try to heat up a 200W copper CPU cooler with a 14W soldering iron you can wait forever for the solder to melt. This also has to do with thermal mass and regulation of the iron. Modern irons with modern tips have the temperature probe inside the tip. This helps a ton with avoiding temperature dips when you start to touch something and makes soldering much easier.
² This means keeping tips clean with a proper cleaner literally before every solder joint is crucial. If your tip is toast and has no shiny bit anymore, clean it. If that doesn't help use Ersa Solder Tip Reactivator or buy a new tip. Of course your parts should also be clean (Isopropanol)
³ There are ways to remove excess solder. The simplest being using the right motion with the tip on a coldish joint, making the excess solder stick to the iron and not to the (colder) joint. Other things are spring loaded suction devices (very useful to get solder out of through holes!) and solder wick (very useful to clean old pads)
⁴ There a tools like third hands and so on, and watching some videos by experienced solderers is a good way (nowadays) to learn it, but a steady hand only comes with practise
Re: Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
#36You don't need any real educational resources to get good at soldering. Any random primer will do. It's genuinely a simple task that doesn't require a lot of explanation or have a lot of tricks. What gets you good at soldering is just practice. Solder a lot. A fun and easy way to do this is to pick up those cheap ($5 or less) electronic solder-it-yourself kits and do a bunch of them. Include ones that contain small s…
> repair (which is a completely different topic from soldering)
Yes. There's repair, rework, build and debugging.
Repair is mostly diagnosis, followed by cleaning and repair of mechanical damage. ICs themselves don't fail much. That's what the original poster is doing.
Rework is mostly careful desoldering followed by new component installation. That's when hot-air rework stations are needed, if you have to replace ICs. This is a "use the right tool for the job" task, where you have little metal heat gun air guides for each IC shape. (I have a bag of those things.)
Building, where you start with a blank board and a supply of components, all with a known-to-work design, is just small scale manufacturing. It takes some skill and training, but the process is simple and repetitive. It's automated in production shops.
Debugging of new board designs requires not just soldering tools but the test equipment to test the thing and an understanding of how it works. This is what electrical engineers and technicians do.
Re: Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
#37If you live near a makerspace / hackerspace, I would definitely recommend doing projects there. Mine has a weekly electronics projects and repair night with free access. This has two main benefits:
1. Access to a bunch of different equipment without breaking the bank. Want to try out a bunch of different kinds of flux? See what kind of de-soldering tools are good for different tasks? Now you can!
2. Access to expertise and moral support. Trying to do everything by yourself is no fun. A YouTube video can be helpful but it's no substitute for a knowledgeable friend or more experienced mentor.
I recently did an RTC battery substitution on my Framework laptop's mainboard, and I could do it with confidence because I had good tools and people to consult at my makerspace.
Re: Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
#38Are you one of those openAI swarms that got into the wild?
Re: Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
#39While soldering is not that hard, different tasks require different tools. Most of them can be from very cheap to very expensive. As a beginner I'd recommend the following: A small USB-C soldering iron supported by IronOS[1], e.g. Pinecil vor TS100 A solid stand with brass wool A KU soldering tip (looks a bit like a knife) for good heat transfer, too small tips are not good Thin ( No clean flux (not a pen) Isopropyl…
I will say it's important that the soldering iron be temperature controlled. It's especially nice if it's one with the temperature sensing integrated into the tip in a cartridge (like the ones you suggested).
Also, 63/37 tin/lead "eutectic" solder is the easiest to use. Wash your hands after using it, or wear gloves. 60/40 solder is almost as easy, and cheaper. Lead-free is more difficult, especially for learning. Learn with lead solder, then switch to lead-free.
Re: Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
A cheap clip-on macro lens for a phone camera is also good for inspecting things, without the cost+space of a proper microscope.
True but you can do actual work under a stereoscopic microscope. It has a vaunted place on my workbench. Disclosure: Old person. ;-)
I've got one as well, and I'll say it's extremely nice for removing splinters. I do a bit of woodworking, so it ends up being unexpectedly dual-purpose.