How to hold a soldering iron.

Ouch. My standard joke is that technical competence begins by learning which end of the soldering iron to grab. Although originally a joke, that picture makes me wonder if there's some truth to the joke.

On Sat, 30 Apr 2016 16:29:53 -0700 (PDT), Wanderer Gave us:

No callouses on her hands. They have no time to form with all the blisters and skin falling off.

On Sat, 30 Apr 2016 16:55:19 -0700 (PDT), Lasse Langwadt Christensen Gave us:

They must all work for Donald Trump.

Those Radio Shack irons don't get very hot.

The next President?

I once dropped an iron and caught it in mid-air. Once.

Wasn't this posted not too long ago?

On Sat, 30 Apr 2016 18:55:40 -0700, John Larkin Gave us:

Maybe the tips do not, but the element sending heat down to the tip does.

Watch the first 45 seconds:

Cold fusion.

Sylvia.

When did any soldering task require fewer than three hands?

Sylvia.

On Sun, 1 May 2016 19:33:24 +1000, Sylvia Else Gave us:

There was a girl at a place I worked at who taught me how to hold two things with one hand. She could sit there and peel away at knitting or chrochette all the while carrying on a conversation with the folks around her.

I attribute some of my dexterous acumen to her.

I can do two separate tasks with my left and right hands. Lots of people can't do that; maybe their brain hemispheres are better connected than mine.

Skill with chopsticks is good training for soldering and such.

I never thought of trying eat something with my chopsticks. Mostly, I use them for test probes and handling small parts:

Also, I'm sure I've burned myself with a soldering iron, but that was so long ago, I don't recall the incidents. More recently, I do recall setting fire to a pile of blueprints that I placed over my soldering iron. I also don't consider my workbench properly personalized until I've applied at least one scorch mark with my soldering iron.

The iron gets rather hot, but the tip doesn't. There's a reason: Notice how the tip is held in with a screw threaded in one side.

The idea behind a soldering iron is for the heating element in the barrel to move as much of the heat towards the tip as possible. Ideally, the barrel should be fairly cool, while the tip should be as hot as possible (as limited by a thermostat). Moving the heat out the end of the ceramic heating element is itself a model of inefficient thermodynamic design. However, that hasn't stopped Radio Shack from making it worse by limiting the contact area of the tip. The tip does NOT fit snuggly into the mating socket in the barrel. There's an air gap on the side of the mating socket under the screw. There's some surface contact between the socket and the tip on the opposite side of the screw, but not much. So, most of the heat is radiated from the barrel, while very little heat makes it to the tip.

You can probably see the problem with your FLIR IR camera.

My Metcal station has a nice iron holder, keeps stuff from catching fire. And only the tip of the iron gets super not, not the middle of the barrel.

My workbench is Ikea, varnished particle board, and it's really tough.

My FLIR only goes to something like 240C. It's really good for scoping parts on boards, but not extreme stuff.

Thermostat? Ceramic element? On a Rat Shack iron?

Can you put an "optical attenuator" in front of the optics? Something that partly blocks some far IR, such as a few folded layers of LDPE black plastic trash bag: It won't be calibrated, but it will produce a relative temperature image. If you're worried about blowing up your FLIR camera, try the trash bags with a cheap IR thermometer first. My guess(tm) is that the Radio Shock tip will be somewhat cooler than the barrel. It shouldn't take much attenuation to get from a 300C soldering iron tip, down to something below 240C.

You can also see something with a near infrared and a filter: "Near infrared soldering iron"

Notice that I prefaced that remark with "ideally". Radio Shock hardware is far from ideal.