solder

115 Articles

Soldering, Up Close And Personal

September 14, 2024 by 13 Comments

A word of warning before watching this very cool video on soldering: it may make you greatly desire what appears to be a very, very expensive microscope. You’ve been warned.

Granted, most people don’t really need to get this up close and personal with their soldering, but as [Robert Feranec] points out, a close look at what’s going on when the solder melts and the flux flows can be a real eye-opener. The video starts with what might be the most esoteric soldering situation — a ball-grid array (BGA) chip. It also happens to be one of the hardest techniques to assess visually, both during reflow and afterward to check the quality of your work. While the microscope [Robert] uses, a Keyence VHX-7000 series digital scope, allows the objective to swivel around and over the subject in multiple axes and keep track of where it is while doing it, it falls short of being the X-ray vision you’d need to see much beyond the outermost rows of balls. But, being able to look in at an angle is a huge benefit, one that allows us a glimpse of the reflow process.

More after the break

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Busted: Toilet Paper As Solder Wick

June 14, 2024 by 30 Comments

It didn’t take long for us to get an answer to the question nobody was asking: Can you use toilet paper as solder wick? And unsurprisingly, the answer is a resounding “No.”

Confused? If so, you probably missed our article a few days ago describing the repair of corroded card edge connectors with a bit of homebrew HASL. Granted, the process wasn’t exactly hot air solder leveling, at least not the way PCB fabs do it to protect exposed copper traces. It was more of an en masse tinning process, for which [Adrian] used a fair amount of desoldering wick to pull excess solder off the pins.

During that restoration, [Adrian] mentioned hearing that common toilet paper could be used as a cheap substitute for desoldering wick. We were skeptical but passed along the tip hoping someone would comment on it. Enter [KDawg], who took up the challenge and gave it a whirl. The video below shows attempts to tin a few pins on a similar card-edge connector and remove the excess with toilet paper. The tests are done using 63:37 lead-tin solder, plus and minus flux, and using Great Value TP in more or less the same manner you’d use desoldering braid. The results are pretty much what you’d expect, with charred toilet paper and no appreciable solder removal. The closest it comes to working is when the TP sucks up the melted flux. Stay tuned for the bonus positive control footage at the end, though; watching that legit Chemtronics braid do its thing is oddly satisfying.

So, unless there’s some trick to it, [KDawg] seems to have busted this myth. If anyone else wants to give it a try, we’ll be happy to cover it.

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Restoring A Vintage CGA Card With Homebrew HASL

June 12, 2024 by 26 Comments

Right off the bat, we’ll stipulate that what [Adrian] is doing in the video below isn’t actual hot air solder leveling. But we thought the results of his card-edge connector restoration on a CGA video card from the early 80s was pretty slick, and worth keeping in mind for other applications.

The back story is that [Adrian], of “Digital Basement” YouTube fame, came across an original IBM video card from the early days of the IBM-PC. The card was unceremoniously dumped, probably due to the badly corroded pins on the card-edge bus connector. The damage appeared to be related to a leaking battery — the corrosion had that sickly look that seems to only come from the guts of batteries — leading him to try cleaning the formerly gold-plated pins. He chose naval jelly rust remover for the job; for those unfamiliar with this product, it’s mostly phosphoric acid mixed with thickeners and is used as a rust remover.

The naval jelly certainly did the trick, but left the gold-plated pins a little worse for the wear. Getting them back to their previous state wasn’t on the table, but protecting them with a thin layer of solder was easy enough. [Adrian] used liquid rosin flux and a generous layer of 60:40 solder, which was followed by removing the excess with desoldering braid. That worked great and got the pins on both sides of the board into good shape.

[Adrian] also mentioned a friend who recommended using toilet paper to wick up excess solder, but sadly he didn’t demonstrate that method. Sounds a little sketchy, but maybe we’ll give it a try. As for making this more HASL-like, maybe heating up the excess solder with an iron and blasting the excess off with some compressed air would be worth a try.

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Let Your Finger Do The Soldering With Solder Sustainer V2

April 11, 2024 by 20 Comments

Soldering is easy, as long as you have one hand to hold the iron, one to hold the solder, and another to hold the workpiece. For those of us not so equipped, there’s the new and improved Solder Sustainer v2, which aims to free up one of however many hands you happen to have.

Eagle-eyed readers will probably recall an earlier version of Solder Sustainer, which made an appearance in last year’s Hackaday Prize in the “Gearing Up” round. At the time we wrote that it looked a bit like “the love child of a MIG welder and a tattoo machine.” This time around, [RoboticWorx] has rethought that concept and mounted the solder feeder on the back of a fingerless glove. The solder guide is a tube that clips to the user’s forefinger, which makes much finer control of where the solder meets the iron possible than with the previous version. The soldering iron itself is also no longer built into the tool, giving better control of the tip and letting you use your favorite iron, which itself is no small benefit.

Hats off to [RoboticWorx] for going back to the drawing board on this one. It isn’t easy to throw out most of your design and start over, but sometimes it just makes sense.

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SMD Soldering, Without The Blobs

March 30, 2024 by 23 Comments

Hand soldering of surface mount components is a bread-and-butter task for anyone working with electronics in 2024. So many devices are simply no longer available in the older through-hole formats, and it’s now normal for even the most homebrew of circuits to use a PCB. But how do you solder your parts? If like us you put a blob of solder on a pad and drop the part into it, then [Mr. SolderFix] has some advice on a way to up your game.

The blob of solder method leaves a little more solder on the part than is optimal, sometimes a bulbous lump of the stuff. Instead, he puts a bit of flux on the pad and then applies a much smaller quantity of solder on the tip of his iron, resulting in a far better joint. As you can see in the video below, the difference is significant. He starts with passives, but then shows us the technique on a crystal, noting that it’s possible to get the solder on the top of these parts if too much is used. Yes, we’ve been there. Watch the whole video, and improve your surface mount soldering technique!

He’s someone we’ve featured before here at Hackaday, most recently in lifting surface mount IC pins.

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Check Out These Amazing Self-Soldering Sleeves From World War II

January 31, 2024 by 18 Comments

Imagine you’re a commando, doing some big secret mission on the continent in the midst of World War II. You need to hook up some wires to your explosive charges, and time is of the essence. Do you bust out the trusty Weller and see if those petulant Axis chaps will let you plug it in somewhere? No! You use a pyrotechnic self-soldering sleeve, as [Our Own Devices] explains.

Like so many British inventions during the war, the sleeves really are ingenious. They were developed by the Special Operation Executive, an organization charged with sabotage and subversion operations in then-occupied Europe.

The soldering sleeves were designed to make electrical connections between detonators and firing wires for explosives.  The sleeves consist of a copper tube through which wires to be joined are fed, with a lump of solder in the middle. The assembly is covered in pyrotechnic material with a safety match-style starter chemical dosed on top. Using the sleeves is simple. First, two stripped wires are fed into either end of the copper tube. The starter the sleeve is then ignited using the box, just like striking a match. The pyrotechnic material then gets red hot, melting the solder and making the connection.

It’s well worth watching the video to see how these field-expedient devices actually work. We’ve explored the use of more-typical solder sleeves before, too. Video after the break.

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Retrotechtacular: The Story Of Turpentine

December 4, 2023 by 33 Comments

If someone in 2023 has ever had much call to use turpentine, chances are good it was something to do with paint or other wood finishes, like varnish. Natural turpentine is the traditional solvent of choice for oil paints, which have decreased in popularity with the rise of easy-to-clean polymer-based paints and coating. Oh sure, there are still those who prefer oil paint, especially for trim work — it lays up so nice — but by and large, turpentine seems like a relic from days gone by, like goose grease and castor oil.

It wasn’t always so, though. Turpentine used to be a very big deal indeed, as shown by this circa 1940 documentary on the turpentine harvesting and processing industry. Even then it was only a shadow of its former glory, when it was a vital part of a globe-spanning naval empire and a material of the utmost strategic importance. “Suwanee Pine” shows the methods used in the southern United States, where fast-growing pines offer up a resinous organic gloop in response to wounds in their bark. The process shown looks a lot like the harvesting process for natural latex, with slanting gashes or “catfaces” carved into the trunks of young trees, forming channels to guide the exudate down into a clay collecting cup.

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