"Cool Touch" Soldering Tool

It's a piece of junk.

You know, I tried making one of these after visiting the Howstuffworks.com website article that discusses how it works. I basically just took a C battery, stretched out paper clips and a rubber band, with the terminal ends of the paper clips maybe 3mm apart.

Thing is, once I fired it up, the contacts on the + and - poles of the

Any suggestions on making this work?

Buy one of the Wahl cordless soldering irons. They do work.

I can vouch for that. In fact, at Beale AFB, that was the only kind you were _allowed_ to use on the SR-71s.

Cheers! RIch

Yes, I'm sure they do, but for a simple project, to build my own seemed like fun...

What would the electronics do, anyway? PWM the current?

--- Yup, it sure seems to be.

Have you visited their website?

If you haven't, you might want to check it out. It's a revelation of how far slime can go if it's left unchecked. I looked at it and it appears to me that they're nothing more than a bunch of SPAMmers trying to justify their tactics by claiming there's a 'need' for their advertising which, by being placed here, on sci.electronics.design, is in direct confict with the charter of this newsgroup as well, I'm sure, as in conflict with the charters of all the other newsgroups they're SPAMming.

Also interesting: I access Usenet through Giganews and pay them for downloads. Uploads are free, as are header downloads and I can, and do, appreciate and respect that policy.

However, if that's the policy to which newsfeeds.com (through whom the Cold Heat hucksters are running their SPAM campaign) also adhere to, then the hucksters are getting to address a _huge_ audience, essentially for free, while all of us who download the bodies attached to their headers have to pay to read their crap.

That might be OK if their posts were prefaced by "ad" or someting like that, to forewarn us that the body of the post contained little more than s*it they were trying to get rid of, (which, BTW, failed on TV) but no...

As far as we all might be concerned, their posts might be a juicy topic to which we can contribute, but no...

They're not looking for discussion, all they're looking for is suckers to buy inventory which even TV couch potatoes turn their noses up at.

-- John Fields Professional Circuit Designer

I bought a 12V soldering iron that plugs into a cigarette lighter many years ago. It works fine but has a cord. I was trying to use a Wahl once outside in brutal cold weather and it couldn't produce enough heat even though it was charged. Didn't have the 12V corded unit back then to make comparison.

The Wahl irons were never intended for that usage. Its like watching someone try to repair a leaking radiator with a Weller 8200 Soldering gun with 100/140 watts of heat. You have to choose the right tool for the job. I had the original orange Wahl iron on my bench for about 10 years and went trough a couple sets of nicads. Most of the time I had the "Tuner extension tip" in it to be able to reach into equipment to resolder a wire or component lead under layers of wire or a gap in the sheet metal without spending hours stripping the equipment to the subassembly level. The rest of the time I used an assortment of Weller irons from 23 watts to 175 watts. If that wasn't hot enough, then I would reach for a propane torch with a bottle of MAP gas and a soldering tip. I ran into a problem with some large copper pipe and brass fittings for a TV transmitter that I needed to separate so I jammed a heat gun into the pipe and set it on high, then used an acetylene torch to supply the rest of the heat without burning a hole in the brass fittings.

It is just a battery powered version of the decades old resistance soldering technique. It looks like the PC board is to control the current flow, to keep it from burning up a section of foil if you accidentally touch the split tip to bare copper foil. The Wahl irons had a "Circuit breaker" tip made to vaporize a small section of foil to isolate a defective circuit to aid in troubleshooting.

Nope - but I did after reading your post.

I'd really love to see someone do an SMT board with the damn thing. Their site shows a picture of someone soldering? an SMT part. Or maybe they are just waving the thing over the board in some form of a bizare technological exorcism...

Unfortunately, your observations below are all too true. It's ugly.

Ed

Mike, Guess that was like taking a knife to a gun fight. The incident of trying to solder with the Wahl in the brutal cold was 30 years ago. I never liked any cordless iron except the butane type. Take Care.

My browser renders it as a starburst emanating from the tip - it's at least 1/2" from the board. ;-)

Solders By Magick!!!! (heh.)

Then again, if they were selling a little "gentle-heat" air gun, I might believe the ad, if I saw them reflowing some thousand-pin, .1mm pitch part. ;-)

Cheers! Rich