World's Worst Soldering!

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.

37/73. True-eutectic solder where RHoS is not an issue.

Anyone who uses 60/40 solder for other than plumbing and direct chassis connections on vintage radios deserves exactly what they get. Full Stop.

Peter Wieck Melrose Park, PA

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.

nor does the website

You have it exectally backwards. I doubt if you will ever find any

37/73 solder. For two reasons. Number one is you now have a compound that is 110 % mix. Sort of impossiable to do. I will allow you a typo and say you ment 37/63. That would be a mix of 37% tin and 63% lead going by the normal way of stating the tin content first.

The mix is 63 % tin and 37 % lead for the eutectic mix of solder. Over the years much solder is sold as 60 % tin and 40 % lead. Close enough for most electronics and very common.

Perhaps it was a return from a customer who had a problem, then tried to fix it - botched it up, then sent it back to Amazon for a refund. The seller didn't bother to test or it simply was repacked in the Amazon warehouse for reshipment.

Much like the people who buy clothes for a party then return them afterwards...

John :-#(#

I tried a new soldering iron long ago that had a sawn off nail as a tip. Th e heating wire was wound onto this tip over an insulating sheet, so it wasn 't replaceable. It soldered perfectly. I expect it would not have handled l arge joints, but I wasn't doing any at the time.

A couple of years ago I tried soldering with nothing but a nail & a flame. Managed to produce good joints on pcbs, but the amount of time the nail sta yed hot enough was very short, limiting what it could handle.

Like many things, if you know what you're doing you can get all sorts of cr ap to work if necessary.

NT

I bought a guitar amp used many years ago where the previous owner had either accidentally or deliberately left inside the speaker enclosure a couple photos someone had taken of what appeared to be the previous owner, a heavy-set jolly-looking African American man eating dinner in his kitchen with what looked like a plate of ribs sitting on top of the amp.

Sadly that amp was stolen from me a number of years ago along with the Polaroids that i'd left in it where I found them for some superstitious reason. Back into the "material continuum"

Yep - sorry. 37/63 lead-to-tin. Early AM post, and not quite awake.

Peter Wieck Melrose Park, PA

My take? ...and I've seen such crappy "rework" in never-been-opened-since-the-factory communist chinese junk before. It's post-test fail rework done in the factory -- by the lowest skilled folks on the totem pole. "Get it working just Good Enough to ship it."

Jonesy

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Well, can't say I would argue with you.

Bought a LCD from Amazon, and while the monitor works fine the brick on a rope was bloody dangerous! The brick has no markings about approvals, so it went to recycling, and the power cord - that was a piece of work

- a two prong (unapproved of course) plug on a two conductor line cord (no approval of course) ending with a computer style 3-prong plug for the brick (...).

The crap they are shipping will kill people.

Back in the late 40s and early 50s TVs in the USA would catch fire regularly. So the US Gov. gave UL some teeth and that stopped happening. Here in Canada CSA was already regulating electrical appliances (had been for years) and as I understand it there were few if any house fires caused by crappy manufacturing shortcuts.

The only real solution is international co-operation and standards that has to come to bear on all products as the general public has no idea about electrical/fire/food safety. I suspect a lot of children and adults have to die first though...

John ;-#(#

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When I was maybe 10-12 years old, I learned to solder making sewing machine attachments in my fathers petticoat factory. The attachments were necessary to make the elaborate folds and stiches found in all garments. Most were made from nickel-silver[1] sheet metal, which solders easily. The weapon of choice was a large block of copper attached to an iron rod and a wooden handle. Heat was provided by a natural gas burner: Getting the temperature right was done by watching how the solder flowed when touched to the tip. Tip cleaner was a block of sal ammoniac. Flux was cocktail of various acids. We used different solders, but mostly very expensive silver solder because of the strength.

In late Jr High Skool, I was introduced to electronic soldering. Of course, I tried to handle a soldering pencil as if it was a block of copper on a stick, and destroyed everything I touched. It took a while to adjust to a smaller soldering iron. My parents bought me an Ungar soldering pencil, which was the best soldering iron of the day. No temp control, no thermostat, but good enough for what I was doing. I eventually collected an assortment of wood burners, real soldering irons, and home made contrivances on the assumption that if I needed a specific temperature, I would also need a different soldering iron.

One of my home made irons used a 16 penny nail as a soldering tip. The solder wouldn't stick to the tip, so I nickel plated most of the tip. That worked. I eventually discovered that mild steel did not burn up as quickly as high carbon drill rods. Iron would have worked better, but I didn't think of trying it.

During the late 1960's, I was a regular visitor to the various electronic surplus stores in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. Among my purchases was a large box of broken Weller WTCPT bases, irons, cords, etc. Something like these: Over the years, I've repaired or rebuilt 20-30 such soldering stations, some of which I still use today. Eventually, I'll run out of repair parts and will need to buy something better.

[1] 60% copper, 20% nickel, 20% zinc and no silver.

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Maybe you had the 2N3773 on your mind, which is almost equivalent to the 2N3772.

I have one similar to those. It is an adjustable temperature. The temperature seems to be stable,but the readout is blank. Have not been able to find a schematic for that particular one on the internet. Found some similar,but not the one I have.

I seldom use it any more. I have one of the inexpensive China $ 70 hot air and iron stations. It heats up very fast and is good enough for my hobby work. I doubt it would hold up for daily use. I would buy the much higher dollar unit if I was in the repair business.

2N3772.

They are pretty much interchangeable in most applications. I prefer the 2N3

772 - I have never had a failure, and I have reliable sources. I have come across a number of counterfeit 73s. This is a hobby for me, so coming acros s even one counterfeit is remarkable, much less 3 out of 5.

Peter Wieck Melrose Park, PA

It's not just soldering where one can scrape the barrel. I remember using 3 filament bulbs in lieu of a multimeter. The TV got fixed. What I can't remember is why I didn't have a multimeter there.

NT

Good Lord! I had no idea you were such a precocious child, Jan! ;-)

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