Many decades ago, when soldering was an activity more often associated with copper fabrication than with electronics, a soldering iron would have been a large lump of copper on a shaft with a wooden handle. You would heat it in a gas flame, and use its pointed end for your soldering. Electric irons have made this a thing of the past, but the basic idea is still one with some merit. [Shake the Future] is here with a modern take on such an iron, one that is heated in the microwave oven.
The business end of the iron is a normal soldering iron bit, but behind it is a piece of sintered silicon carbide wrapped in ceramic fibre and covered with Kapton tape and a high-temperature-resin 3D printed shield. On the back of that is a 3D-printed handle. The whole thing is put in the microwave oven for a few tens of seconds to heat to temperature, and thereafter, you have however long the thermal mass of the silicon carbide holds the temperature in which to do your soldering.
It’s an interesting idea that we can see has some use in situations where you need an iron for a quick job away from your bench but within reach of the kitchen. We like the lateral thinking, and it’s certainly fascinating to see the construction. But in an age of USB-C power packs and irons we have more convenient soldering on the go, so we’re not sure how useful it would be to us.
Silicon carbide is an interesting material, it’s not the first time we’ve written about it being used in a high temperature application.
hahaha i was thinking of using a bit of thin steel rod and a bic lighter for the ‘soldering iron to weld plastic’ trick, rather than gumming up the tip on my ‘real’ iron. but putting it in the microwave!! hahaha my mind is blown
Get a sutable shaped cheap chinesium tip or knock-off cartridge, and reserve it for that kind of work.
So all this fascinating intent about precision temp control is no longer relevant?
not worst than the average firestarter or gas iron… quite less portable once you consider the microwave oven through… but, yeah, definitely not using any of these three alternatives… pinciles are so cheap for portable work and a decent station at home is hard to beat…
The one thing a portable electric and quite possible gas one will not have that this just might is enough thermal mass or sustained power deliver to actually get that tricky job hot enough – some things are just such good radiators your portable iron really can’t deliver enough umph (though that is improving every generation as the battery etc do – so it might not be a problem that will come up for most now).
I sincerely doubt this iron using a relatively small piece of silicon carbide can match the sustained power delivery of my Portasol butane soldering iron.
It won’t match the sustained power delivery of any battery iron either – but it might (and emphasis on might) be able to dump enough energy through the tip fast enough to heat up that tough joint other portable irons suffer with. As it does have relatively lots of thermal mass.
Your gas iron if its anything like mine can’t really run cool enough for most jobs to just use it while its actively cooking, but then even while cranked up still can’t actually dump enough energy in to melt a large solder blob on a chunky ground plane for huge radiative power in a reasonable time – might get there after you have turned the whole board into something too hot to handle – as the fuel supply will last that long, but still not good..
lol at best all those functions are performed by whacking F7 in word before posting it to wordpress
This is really neat and all, but I’m much more interested in the portable power supply that can power the microwave oven, so I don’t have to solder in my kitchen.
I mean, technically you can operate a microwave anywhere you have an electrical outlet, it doesn’t have to stay in your kitchen. But your implicit point that you can also just operate an ELECTRIC iron anywhere you have an electrical outlet is a fair one.
I prefer to use my local volcano, Mount Doom. It’s just a short journey there and back again.
Having only 9 fingers can make soldering trickier, tho.
Honestly, this guy….🤦🏻♂️ pretends to convince “anyone with a slither of practical experience” that using a “microwavable piece of metal” is more practical than sticking a USB power bank in the pocket and use a (wildly available) portable soldering iron.
Kudos to the writer for finding the courage to write that it is “an interesting idea which we can see has some use in situations”. 😅
“editor/copy editor/proofreader” …What decade do you think we’re living in, out of curiosity? Websites got rid of those YEARS ago. Might as well ask how it got past the lead-type setter, or the inkwell-filler. 😄
wonderful idea! why I never thought of that! …use an already power wasting microoven to transfer heat to the device …wondering about the efficiency… wait a minute… next iteration…adding an internal resistance to the device itself! damn I,m good!
Why does soddering have a silent ‘L’ in it?
Re-Latinization. Spelling reforms changed the spelling of many English words to reflect their Latin roots – in this case, the latin word “solidare” (to make solid).
Maybe the same reason Americans pronounce “kilometer” as “killah’metr”: borrowed a pronunciation from the French (where solder is “souder”).
English doesn’t so much borrow from French, as it takes it around back and mugs it for its lunch money. (I mean, we turned their word for coffee into the word for a place you can GET coffee. Why? Because #MURRIKA, and also shut up!)
Because the German word is “löten”.
Shhhh….
It’s a feature.
You’re paying extra for it..
It doesn’t.
Soon we may look for such mistakes to identify human-written content. Then we’ll complain about the old days when good content was still written by us.
“Think step by step. You are a writer for Hackaday. You will sometimes misspell words. Do not proof read your work. Do not research. Write about [insert article here].”
“You are a Hackaday commenter. Write a comment for this article. Be sure to harshly criticize any spelling or grammar mistakes. If the article includes a video, don’t watch it and complain about Youtube. Discover any commercial products that could replace the subject of the article and post links to buy them. If the article is about energy or green initiatives, surreptitiously deny climate change. Insinuate that you are smarter than both the author and project builder.”
I find this very innovative.
But but… metals break microwave oven?
No they don’t. They just have voltages induced in them. You might get a bit of arcing from the metal to the microwave body.
Almost. They have currents induced in them.
“Can microwave ovens produce superconductors? You heard it here first!”
Shake The Future has a LOT of videos on safely heating metal in microwaves by shielding it with silicon carbide, that soaks up microwaves and thermally heats the metal. I’ve copied his work and am now melting/casting copper on a somewhat regular basis, that my big aluminum casting foundry can’t melt because of the higher temperatures required.
If the software you write in has the built in checker for grammar and spelling and that fails to catch something you are likely going to miss it when reading it yourself – it is so close to correct the word form looks right and you know what it is meant to be.
Heck I’d bet most folks reading it wouldn’t notice because it is so close to correct (I certainly didn’t but as my spelling is pretty terrible I’d not expect to catch many spelling errors of this sort. As long as letters can make up something like the right word sounds it looks correct enough to me. As so many ‘correct’ spellings are when you stop to study them actually massively incorrect if read strictly by the sounds the letters make anyway, making everything just an arbitrary this is the “correct” spelling for best fit to the word (We should probably go back to Runes – they have all the right sounds for English so would fix that problem).
If I’m in the kitchen I will be using my grandfather’s soldering iron on the gas burner.
The cast iron drain plumbing in my house was soldered by melting lead in a pot on a burner, then pouring it into the joint.
I missed that one but saw “high-teperature-resin” which hasn’t been mentioned.
If you use solder with lead, I wouldn’t put this anywhere near a kitchen
I do like the concept, I’m a sucker for novel ideas even though I can’t see a use for it myself.
The only potentially practical application I’ve been able to think of is perhaps if it can reach silver solder temps it might be useful in a situation where for whatever reason it would be dangerous or impractical to use a flame.
Might even be useful for jewelry making/silver smithing, silver melts at ~960°C. Silicon carbide can handle something like 1600°C before it starts oxidizing in air if memory serves.
Granted I don’t know if a microwave would be able to heat it to such temperatures but given that they can melt glass with a little effort it doesn’t seem exceedingly far fetched.