Tuesday, March 28, 2006
The Easy Way to Solder
When I was younger I studied electronics and hence spent some time soldering up electric circuits. Soldering such circuits is fairly simple - slide the wires of a component through the board, lay the board upside down on the bench, touch the wires and board with a soldering iron and apply some multi-core solder. Job done.
Railway modelling also requires soldering but rarely has a nice board to solder onto. Consider soldering a wire to a din plug. You hold the plug in one hand, the wire in the other, grab the soldering iron in a third and apply some solder with… oh dear, you’ve run out of hands.
But that’s the method multi-core solder. There’s two parts to multi-core solder. The solder itself which is just a metal alloy with a lowish melting point, and flux which helps the solder flow over the surface of the components being soldered.
You can also buy separate flux and non-cored solder. This makes soldering tasks such as that described above much easier:
- With a small paintbrush brush on some liquid flux to the places you want to join.
- Take your soldering iron and touch it against the solder so that you have a small blob of solder on the tip.
- Hold together the pieces to be soldered (use one of those ‘helping hands’ stands if necessary).
- Touch the tip of the soldering iron briefly against the ‘fluxed’ joint. You will hear a fizz from the flux and the solder will flow wherever the flux has been applied.
Occasionally you’ll find that you didn’t have enough solder on the tip of the iron and you’ll need to go back with some extra, or you may need to re-apply the flux, but things will improve with practice.
The above process may sound slightly complex but once you get into a routine you can get soldering at a reasonable pace, and with only two hands.