indium solder

Hint. Look at what the 'unit of measure' is. This is a 3 foot long _spool_, not 3 feet of solder...

Best Wishes

It's just your not so atypical ecommerce site, apparently set up by an idiot.

The picture shows spools with lots of solder on them. The text is very ambiguous, not mentioning the usual critierion, the weight of the dang solder.

You might look on eBay, where there are several spools of Indium wire and solder up for bid, some at much more reasonable prices.

Actually it realy does looks like its only 3ft of solder, it says '3ft in a tube' although the quantity to order field seems to have number of spools as units.

Its intersting you can buy indium spheres and indium shot.

Are there any indium mines near you ?

what are you soldering? I unsoldered one of those tiny oscillators wich have the ceramic packaged crystal soldered on top of the ceramic main part and it all came to pieces ! luckily I managed to solder it all back together again lol, it was an expensive tcxo type.

Colin =^.^=

They don't actually say what a "3 foot spool" _is_, do they? Are you talking about a spool like the ones in the pic, but with a spindle 3 feet long? Who's ever even heard of such a thing?

Thanks, Rich

Have a look at

Regards,

Boris Mohar

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

void _-void-_ in the obvious place

I agree, the text on the page is ambiguous because it doesn't make sense, but I can't think of anything it could mean but a piece of wire .030" dia and 3 ft long. How else could [This solid core solder wire is three feet long and is packaged in a tube. The diameter is .030".] be interpreted? So, as I mentioned, they only want $180 for 3 ft of standard SnPb without flux. That would be $433/cm^3.

I took your suggestion and ordered a 1 oz ingot from eBay. Thanks. Only $21. It's InSn 52/48 eutectic. Melting point 118 C. If the density I looked up was right and I didn't screw up the math, that's $0.74/g or $5.38/cm^3. The only disadvantage, for the hand work I'm thinking about, is that it isn't wire. I'll have to shave pieces off, I guess.

So I looked back on those pages I posted earlier. There, 3 ft of 52/48 InSn wire is only $350! That's $115/g or $839/cm^3. That's only 156 times more expensive than the eBay stuff, which says, "metal purity IN EXCESS of 99.9%".

I posted my original question because the prices on the Indium Corp e-commerce pages seemed so insane. They still do.

Mainly I just wanted to have a bit to experiment with.

One thing I thought about is using it to solder down the heatsink flanges on RF transistors, maybe with mechanical attachment too for safety. Figured it would combine good heat transfer and complete grounding. Good silver epoxy is expensive, needs to be refrigerated, and has a self life.

Also wanted to see how good it sticks to gold (if at all).

Interesting stuff, but pretty spendy too. There was a thread about it a while back, wasn't there?

Just go to your local Indium Reservation...

Regards Ian

My best guestimate that a 3 foot spool in a shipping tube would hold at least 10 lbs of solder, more likely standardized at 10 lbs. At todays prices that seems quite reasonable. I am having a hard time visualizing how / where / what kind of manufacturing that it would be useful though. I did note that typical indium alloys are only about twice the price; probably more in smaller lots though.

As I posted in a different part of the thread, the entry on their site says: This solid core solder wire is three feet long and is packaged in a tube. The diameter is .030".

If that isn't just a 3-foot-long piece of solder wire, please explain to me how else it can be interpreted? I do agree that none of the pictures seem to match the word description.

As before the spool is three feet long with about an inch thick winding of solder wire on it (about 30 layers at 0.030). More familiar solder spools for 1 Lb of solder are about 3" or 4" long. Given the tensile strength of

looks that way.... otoh the indium bars seem to be more sensibly priced,

Bye. Jasen

melts at 118C:

you could possibly cast your own wire by squirting it from a plastic syringe into oil or anti-boil radiator coolant! :)

I found a similar product on this page....

buy 150 pounds (30 units), the price is right!

Bye. Jasen