World's Worst Soldering!

The standard is for the tin content to be first and then the lead.

The 60/40 is most common for electronic solder, but 63/37 is slightly better.

The plumbing is often 50/50, or was before the RoHS and lead free stuff started.

I do agree the solders other than the tin/lead is very bad and hard to work with. As I just do it for a hobby and in the US, anything I do is with the tin/lead. If the area of a board I am working on has the RoHS type solder on it, I remove it from the part I am working on.

It is going to be interisting to see if the devices have the 'tin whisker' problem that high tin no lead content solder can have in a few years.

I also have their resistance box, which is very good!

I tossed the cap box.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

I have terrible eyesight, so I got a used Mantis microscope thing.

I steady my hand on a table or something when I solder, especially super fine pitch surface-mount parts. The Metcal iron really, really helps.

You're fine, you're just using cruddy tools.

For really small surface mount stuff, I use a big wedge tip and slop solder on all the pins, shorting everything, then wick it.

A q-tip and acetone cleans things up pretty.

I was afraid of 1206 parts when they first arrived. Now a US8 creates only mild anxiety. 0805's look gigantic.

Desoldering is trickier than soldering surface mount parts. The part is a goner, but you don't want to damage the board. My production people are brilliant, so I let them do the hard ones.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Not even close. I hold that honor. Long ago I soldered a 25-pin RS232 cable. The blobs were so big I couldn't get the housings on. I didn't think any of the pins were shorted, but I wasn't positive. I brought the cable along when we visited a friend with hardware skills. While we were talking he casually unsoldered my botched job and resoldered it nicely. I probably never soldered again :-(

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Cheers, Bev 
    When you stop bitching you start dying.

You bought that NEW? Or was it second/third/fifth hand?

It looks like an idiot tried to modify it. I have trouble imagining a legitimate company letting something that hacked out for sale.

John :-#(#

I bury the end in a blob of molten solder on the iron tip. Works well, melts/burns it off and it comes out already tinned.

Actually, maybe I do solder pretty well. Hmm, if it is a valuable enough skill I will have to try to capitalise on it.

Denatured alcohol is my go-to PCB cleaning fluid now, acetone is a better solvent but seems to also aggressively maul a lot of different plastics and resins as well.

I absent-mindedly poured a bit in a Styrofoam cup one day, the bottom instantly disintegrates into goop, fun times

John Larkin wrote

Strange, in

I see a position marked as R5 with a capacitor in it... Maybe they use the same board for resistor bank and capacitor bank?

It is a good argument (the other pics) to use flexible wires from switches etc to the PCB, not use PCB mounted / soldered user controls. After some switch rotations the solder joints will make bad contact.

New, from Amazon. It arrived that way. I opened it because it didn't work right.

It's Chinese.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

My uncle Sheldon had a TV repair shop and used to babysit me, but he couldn't solder because he always had a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. So I sat in his lap and soldered for him, starting about the age of 3.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

I have been soldering for about 60 years and still manage to make occasional shity joint. Teaching and observing others mistakes:

Relax. Some of the pads are starting to lift. This is usually from too much pressure and heat. Tension will do that. You never need to press tip hard. The heat transfer is via molten solder.

Use biggest tip you can. Clean it on Brass pad and not wet cellulose sponge. Ever since I switched to Brass, my Metcal tips last forever. The thermal shock of wet sponge is hard on tips.

Flux.

Regards,

Boris Mohar

Got Knock? - see: Viatrack Printed Circuit Designs (among other things)

void _-void-_ in the obvious place

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Some professional soldering people do that far worse.

The only problem for me in a possible shortcut between the two connections of the rectyfier bridge, an insulation pipe should be welcomed. It surely is the mains rectyfier, so a high voltage that could spike.

You can't see it properly from that angle which I admit looks alarming. If you could view it in 3D, you'd see there's plenty of clearance between those leads and they're very rigid, plus this is the low voltage/high current one and the applied voltage from the mains transformer across that secondary winding is only around 3.3V. I admit it's ugly, but it does the job fine and should last much longer than the failed monolithic bridge it replaces.

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It's actually under 4V AC entering that "hand-crafted" rectifier.

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These are just bog-standard soldering irons with no fancy temp control. But their tips are in much better condition than you imagined above, thankfully!

Maybe it was the additional 'jacketing' that caused the issue? You'd be trapping a layer of warm air in there causing a build up of heat, I'd guess?

Thanks for the pep-talk btw. :-)

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That's very nice of you, John, but if you actually saw me in action you couldn't miss a distinct lack of dexterity on my part!! Anyway, 'tis said a bad workman always blames his tools....

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OK, but a shortcut mai lead to some amperes.

Depends on the magnet wire. If it's Beldsol or one of the knock-offs from other makers (see eBay), this works pretty well. If it's formvar, you need to scrape it or use a flame.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
https://hobbs-eo.com

wrote in :

That is nothing, even before I was borm I would stick my hand out of mama's and grap the iron to practice soldering.