You have some fine pitch soldering to do, but all you have on hand is a big soldering iron. What do you do? There are a few possible answers, but [Mr SolderFix] likes to pull a strand from a large wire, file the point down, and coil it around the soldering iron. This gives you a very tiny hot tip. Sure, the wire won’t last forever, but who cares? When it gives up, you can simply make another one.

Many people have done things like this before — we are guilty — but we really liked [Mr Solder Fix’s] presentation over two videos that you can see below. He coils his wire over a form. In his case, he’s using a screwdriver handle and some tape to get to the right size. We’ve been known to use the shanks of drill bits for that purpose, since it is easy to get different sizes.

Truthfully, while sometimes you do really need a tiny tip, we prefer having a tip with some thermal mass. If you use something shaped like a slotted screwdriver blade, you can get contact area when you need it, or rotate the iron 90 degrees and get a very narrow profile.

But the copper coil method does work well, as you can see. This will work with nearly any iron. The first examples with fairly large resistors work predictably well. But we were really impressed with some of the very fine pitch connectors in part 2.

Of course, a fine tip is only part of the equation. It doesn’t hurt that he has a microscope and thin solder. If you want to up your SMD game, Oregon State University can help. We find it amusing that many products today are smaller than the components we used to use.