Soldering Crash Course: Basic Techniques, Tips and Advice!

[wermy]

So what other "crash-course" type videos would you guys like to see?

[rlgn]

I'm a 71 year old female who has been soldering here and there for most of my adult life, I never claimed to be an expert. Thank goodness because I just learned a few things that made me realize that I've been doing a couple things wrong. Thank you for posting this video. I certainly do appreciate it because I'm going to attempt to replace the switches in my M570 Trackball mouse.

[darosenberry]

I'm an electrical engineer, and this is the best video I've found on YouTube for a primer on soldering. Excellent work!

[kardoid]

I am 43yrs old, and when I was a little kid my dad always had soldering equipment lying around even though he never soldered. I would always try to fix broken remotes or electrical equipment with a lose solder, my mistake always was melting the soldering wire on the tip of the solder iron and dumping a huge drop of solder on to what I was trying to fix…. And now it angers me that no one corrected me and seeing how easy it was.. lol. I could have been a soldering king by now 😂

[mskiara]

I have been curious how difficult soldering is, so I express my thanks for creating this guide to assist beginners. Soldering is definitely an essential skill to learn.

[MD-wkgj]

I’m 4 minutes in and realize this is the exact detail without fluff I’ve been seeking. Thank you.

I’m learning a lot and already feel more confident.

[robertcasey]

Terrific Video TY. Haven’t soldered in years. I just inherited the contents of an early Radio & TV Shop. It sold and repaired both. It’s been preserved and passed down over the years. The shop opened around WW II. Each item resembles a museum piece. Hundreds of radios & TVs. Tens of thousands of repair parts; bulbs, etc..+. It was my Grandfather’s shop. The shop was successful, but he pretty much kept it just for storage and repairs. He’d started installing TVs in hospital rooms. Back then patients paid rent to watch TV. He supplied thousands of TVs and collected rental fees. Here’s something shocking I learned. His TV rental customers were billed by mail. In the 1980s I asked him: “Of those countless customers how many never paid you?” He looked down as if he’d never considered such a thing, paused, then replied, “Honestly Bob, I know it was less than 5, I’d guess 2 or 3.” A different era. As a young man he tried to enlist but he’d been born blind in one eye. He spent the War learning the trade via a mail order correspondence course. He saved everything. The lessons and catalogs are so damn cool. There are even rolled up 6’ x 6’ schematics of early TVs. They’re beautifully artistic, I’m framing a couple. The family folklore goes like this: Grand Pap Ben built his own first TV. In fact the first one in the neighborhood. His parents, my Great Grandparents, had to point this amazing new invention toward the front porch windows to accommodate the overflow of outdoor curiosity seekers.
I have his Shop’s working neon sign. The name of the shop circles a 2.5’ clock. We were fortunate, with five generations for years.
Forgive me, I’ve gone on too long. I love him and miss him still. TY

[dustinfrancisblue]

Finally: A truly articulate, intelligent, no-nonsense guy, and a very well-done video!.... Give me more!

[tavarisjones]

Your first tip was crucial to me to learn to solder. I initially thought that you got solder on the tip and almost "painted" it onto the wires. Learning that you heat the wires so that the draw/wick the solder in place was a game changer for me and led to work that was very passable :)

[goodun]

A couple of comments that may be useful to newbies. Traditional tin- lead solder that is designed for electronics usage usually contains a rosin flux which is actually a pine tree type product, non toxic, and generally non corrosive and non conductive. The fumes from soldering this type of solder may be mildly irritating to your nose and throat, but the boiling point of lead is much higher than the temperatures you are soldering at and therefore any kind of lead poisoning scenario from the fumes is extremely unlikely, but you should certainly wash your hands after handling it. Lead free solder generally uses a very different type of flux made from organic acids, the fumes of which are extremely unpleasant to breathe and can be potentially toxic. Those specialized lead-free fluxes are also both conductive and corrosive and *must* be thoroughly removed from the circuit board or they can cause problems for the circuitry had some later date. Rosin flux is best dissolved and cleaned away with alcohol, but lead free type fluxes are often water-soluble and may or may not clean off easily with alcohol.

Also note that lead free solder is more corrosive to the soldering iron tips than lead solder, partly because of the corrosive effects of organic fluxes and especially because of the higher temperature tip settings necessary in order for lead-free solder to flow well. Regardless of which type of solder you are working with, the soldering iron tips will degrade with time and use, so be sure to buy a couple of spares, and ideally you should buy an arrangement of shapes and sizes. For most electronics work I find that the simple conical, sharply pointed tip as used in this video is not the preferred tip shape. A chisel shape tip with a rounded, blunt end works best for about 95% of my electronics work. Get an assortment of tip sizes and shapes to experiment with. Note that high quality soldering tips are usually made of copper (or sometimes brass) that has been plated with iron or steel. Steel resists the corroding effects of solder and flux much better than plain copper does, and yet still wets to the solder well; copper is a better heat conductor, but plain unplated copper very quickly pits, corrodes and oxidises from the constant heat and chemical effects of the solder and flux. So many of the soldering tips are made in Asia nowadays, probably from a variety of recycled metals, that you might have to try several different brands and sources to get something that lasts a reasonably long time.

I do like the brass wool tip cleaner shown in the video here; they work quite well and I have read elsewhere that the traditional wet sponge cleaning technique tends to cause micro fractures in the tip and shortens its life. (The springy brass sponge tends to fling little bits of solder around as you clean/wipe the tip, and so a holder with a hood over the brass wool will help contain the mess). You can use steel wool to clean the tip if absolutely necessary, but with proper tip care, maintenance and suitable temperature settings, steel wool shouldn't be necessary.

By the way, the "best" way to turn the tip of the soldering iron so black and oxidised that it doesn't work well for soldering is to use it to melt and fuse plastic parts, repairing cracks and so on; a useful technique, but keep a sacrificial extra tip around just for that use. By the way, *never* scrape a soldering iron tip with a razor blade or take a file to it in order to "clean" it (as shown in some You Tube videos). Never! You will remove the steel plating and the tip will wear out that much faster. You may find it instructive to put a magnet to the soldering iron tip and see if it is magnetic to any degree. A copper or brass tip that is still plated will have at best a very mild magnetic attraction. If it's strongly magnetic then the chances are good that the entire tip is made of steel. If a highly magnetic steel tip still works well for your soldering purposes, that's fine, but generally copper or brass are better heat conducting materials for our purposes....

Regardless, lead-free solder often tends to make a more grainy, crystalline, dull looking solder joint, and the solder joint is likely to break down prematurely if exposed to extreme heat from a power supply resistor or regulator, and interestingly also tends to break down in extreme cold temperatures and form "tin whiskers", aka dendrites, that can short-circuit to adjacent parts or circuit paths and PCB foil traces (as polar explorers and NASA engineers have discovered, the hard way; Google "tin pest").

I personally prefer traditional tin- lead electronic solder with a flux core. Lead free solder doesn't wet and flow as well as lead solder, and is responsible for numerous devices breaking down and failing prematurely and ending up in the landfill. If you are just starting out learning to solder, I recommend that you start with lead solder, and only use a known, name brand product from a reliable source, such as Kester or Weller. Be advised that solder, or the flux inside of it sometimes seems to go bad if it is old and therefore freshly made product is probably better. There's also a lot of variation in lead free alloys and the fluxes they contain. Probably a good idea to buy at least 2 different brands of solder from different sources and see if one is easier to work with or gives you more consistent results. It is also a good idea to buy yourself some separate flux in paste or liquid form; but unfortunately I have seen cases where soldering flux that isn't actually designed for work on electronics is being sold to electronics hobbiists. Always check the label on the bottle to see if it has a precaution against using it for electronics work. The highly acidic ( and corrosive) fluxes designed for soldering copper water pipes are not the same as, and not interchangeable with, fluxes designed for soldering circuit boards and electronic components; nor can plumbing solder be used as a substitute for electronics solder. Be aware that there is a special-purpose "soldering paste" which is a mixture of powdered solder (typically lead-free) and flux, designed specifically for soldering microprocessors with miniature, nearly microscopic pins (or hidden "pins" on the underside of the processor chip), and therefore is not the same as plain soldering flux.

[Lep_]

Excellent video, helped get me from never holding an iron to finishing my first electronics project. The one thing I'll say that I'm kinda surprised wasn't mentioned in the video and doesn't seem to be very frequent in the comments: keep things ventilated! The wisps of smoke that come off the iron are mostly flux fumes, and they can cause chronic respiratory issues (namely asthma). The lead in leaded solder is most dangerous if flakes of it (like, say, the ones that tend to come off the tip of your iron when you clean it) are ingested or inhaled, but soldering with it also produces some lead-based fumes that are equally dangerous with enough exposure. Make sure the space you're working in is reasonably open; open a door if you're in the garage, a window if you're in an office, etc. If you can, use a carbon-filter-based smoke absorber to pull those fumes away from your face and to keep the air cleaner. If you don't have one (or ideally even if you do), use a desk or household fan behind or to the side of you to push air away from you and toward the open window/ventilation.

[Obsidian_Iris_]

This is the best tutorial on soldering for those who know next to nothing about it. Every other tutorial for beginners I’ve watched assumed the newbie knew what tools and supplies were needed, they just needed to know how to use them. I appreciate that you explained what the specialized substances and materials and what they do in the process.

[LelandHasGames]

This is an excellent video and there just isn't enough videos about soldering. I know voultar has quite a lot of content based around soldering and stuff but, he never really goes into detail about all of the little stuff. You nailed this one, dude.

[CaptainDirt]

Finally! A guide that's both broad-spectrum and specific on each individual subject from a reliable source. Thanks a ton!

[mikeburns]

I’m retired and just starting out to try to see if I can do some board repairs. This is by FAR the best and most concise tutorial I have seen explaining soldering. Nice job & thank you sir!

[itwsntme]

After watching countless soldering videos making it look easy, trying and getting no results whatsoever, this one finally gave me all the information I needed in a clear fashion. I was able to reproduce all the exercises, except that last board on board one, which I'm not interested in at the moment.

I have several projects that I had been putting off because of lack of confidence in my soldering, that can now tackle.

Thanks so much for this.

[ericyokie]

This was great! I've never soldered before and ordered an adapter board for my pi with unsoldered components, because I've always wanted to solder and was determined to do it myself. With your help, I got it right on the first try! Thank you. I can now connect Atari 2600 controllers directly to my RetroPie for a more authentic feel 🙂

[livetohash]

I watched this and a few other vids, n went from bird poop all over my boards to beautiful points in a few days.
... Thx so much! I still use flux on all my joins, n just spray it off after. Keeping my tip clean was NEVER a thought, but now I'm Capt Clean after every touch 🎉🎉
I even go as far as to mark my solder roll every 5mm with a sharpie to be sure I don't just feed it in like a madman 😂

[alancharles]

Oh deep joy! I’m a British bloke 71, so I was tickled that you got the pronunciation of solder out of the way so soon! I have been putting off a crucial job on a model railway I am building because it means soldering. Your crash course was just pure gold, from the blindingly obvious (meaning I didn’t see it) point that you heat both pieces and introduce the solder to the two hot surfaces. I am so fired up now. thank you so much!

[vkvsp]

Really glad you mentioned rosin core solder. I've seen so many comments about soldering where people say you have to use flux. I worked for years doing electronic repairs on telecoms and radio gear and before that, electronic assembly. I never once used flux, because all the solder I used was rosin core. Even when I was trained in high-reliability soldering, we never used flux.