Cold heat soldering tool

It does work, and pretty well. I think that on a very basic level, it passes a current through the tip whenever solder is available to complete the circuit. They're pretty nice to have when you're putting speakers in your car doors or scavenging in scrapyards. I am not sure it's the best choice for ESD-sensitive work though.

Does anyone know if it's been evaluated for this kind of soldering?

I've seen it mentioned on the QRP-L amateur radio forum; it's a waste of money for electronic work, at any rate.

I think it passes a high current through the joint to be soldered.

Leon

its ok for a quick portable solution to do things like connectors in your car, audio system and maybe a coax connector while your up in the air on a tower ect. i wouldn't try it on anything small like boards and smt parts etc... especially on boards since it does generate current and you may just hit the correct component on the board and the correct position thus passing current for a moment through a sensitive component.

Agreed. I have one and have given them as gifts, but you have to realize that they are best at precisely what the commercial says they are. I haven't even attempted any kind of real electronics work with mine, because I know it'll be a disaster. Instead, it's used for bulk (but not too bulky) soldering jobs, e.g. wires to connectors, patch jobs, etc.

If you try to heat too much material with it, you won't get anywhere, but for medium-sized jobs it does indeed work very well, as advertised.

Dirty little secret: the only electronics (at least in the basic $20 version) are the LEDs. Literally, all the "magic" is in the tip, made of some material that presumably aids in the process somehow. The switch connects the two ends of the 4 AA's to the two sides of the tip, and incidentally the LEDs. A current dump across the part to be soldered (6V at whatever current the AA's can put out) heats it up enough to melt solder and get the job done. I'm tempted to take some batteries and plain old wire and see what happens, should be similar results except for the sacrificial aspect of the tip.

I don't think it's actually going to be any kind of problem for mildly sensitive electronics, unless you're not very careful. Touching one side of the tip to the circuit won't do anything, because the circuit is open on the other end, batteries or no. As the other side connects, the voltage is shunted entirely through the pin/wire/etc being heated. The only way you're going to get a high-current 6V dump through your part is if you manage to touch each half of the tip to separate ends of the circuit and allow a loop through your parts.

I am sure it doesn't comply with military or NASA standards for their kind of work, but I wonder how damaging it can actually be. You can't damage an IC by passing any amount of current through only one pin. I think there are a couple different sized tips available too.

Now if you contact two different pins with the two halves of the tip, I can see that having an unhappy ending. This is probably easy to do when the trace being soldered leads to other pins on the same device. Aside from that, though, I imagine that the tool being ungrounded would be more dangerous to the work than the way it operates.

The only reason I don't have one is because I've got a great electric-powered iron on my bench, and three or four perfectly useful butane irons in my toolbox. It's probably fine for what it is, a portable iron; but I've seen that Ronco ad and I don't agree with their claim that it's the ultimate soldering system for everything from the bench to the beach.

" snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com:

Marketing... Make your tool seem like the best thing in the universe by reducing the size of your universe of discourse. I've got one and have been unable to find anything worth soldering with it. I wind up breaking things trying to let the tip get hot enough to start melting the solder.

Puckdropper

By definition no currrent can pass through *one* pin. There has to be a return path.

That return path is the other pins though.

There's plenty of damge I can see this iron doing to electronics.

Graham

It's a piece of crap. It'll solder two skinny wires together - that's about it. Somebody mentioned soldering a coax connector when you're up in the tower. No way.

Ed

What I meant was, if all the current enters and exits through the same pin, crossways or longitudinally, there's no problem. This is certainly possible. But it's very easy to get your tip halves in between two pins, or to contact a pin and the land you're trying to join before they're electrically connected.

Small amounts of current flowing on the board during soldering are harmless to 99.99% of electronic components. Electrostatically significant voltages are what you have to watch out for, and it's a problem with all portable soldering irons, not just electric ones. It would be interesting to know just how "small" the current and voltage used in ColdHeat soldering is.

I've thought it a few times but I'd almost be embarrassed to be seen leaving the store with one.

As well as the answers here, search google groups.

If you just want portability, the butane irons work wonderfully, have nice tips like real irons and can be refilled in a snap. Mine is an orange one made in Ireland (Portasol).

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

However, one should be somewhat more careful where one might happen to set down a butane iron, as the exhaust ports can be just a tiny bit hotter in the off-axis direction than one's common experience with resistive element heaters.

Fortunately, I rather quickly entered into full-bore "Holy shit!" mode and got to it before the ESD pad (or anything else!) was too seriously damaged... ;-)

It's not complex, I'd expect a minimum of 1.5V, if it puts all the cells in parallel, and several amps of current.