Resources to Get Good at Soldering?
Hello. I've recently started soldering, specifically wanting to repair the joysticks on several Playstation 4 controllers I have, but I also want to get good at electronic repair in general.
Right now I've busted a board, and managed to desolder and resolder a stick but the controller doesn't turn on anymore. I'm doing this all by myself, and I think I'm following good advice (ventilation, good iron tip, using flux etc...).
But there are many variables, and a lot of experts have different opinions on stuff. Does anyone know good resources that I could use for getting good and making less mistakes ? Thanks.
166 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 24.4 ms ] threadWhat gets you good at soldering is just practice. Solder a lot. A fun and easy way to do this is to pick up those cheap ($5 or less) electronic solder-it-yourself kits and do a bunch of them. Include ones that contain small surface mount parts.
You can also practice desoldering on them, or pick up broken electronics and desolder parts from those.
Yes. There's repair, rework, build and debugging.
Repair is mostly diagnosis, followed by cleaning and repair of mechanical damage. ICs themselves don't fail much. That's what the original poster is doing.
Rework is mostly careful desoldering followed by new component installation. That's when hot-air rework stations are needed, if you have to replace ICs. This is a "use the right tool for the job" task, where you have little metal heat gun air guides for each IC shape. (I have a bag of those things.)
Building, where you start with a blank board and a supply of components, all with a known-to-work design, is just small scale manufacturing. It takes some skill and training, but the process is simple and repetitive. It's automated in production shops.
Debugging of new board designs requires not just soldering tools but the test equipment to test the thing and an understanding of how it works. This is what electrical engineers and technicians do.
Eh…like the saying goes “there are levels to this sh*t”
If you just want to play around as a hobbyist, sure, it can be treated as a simple task. But if you’re working on, say, space avionics it is much more detailed and complex.
My friend Jim's been soldering since the 1950s. We solder a lot of things with leads, for this, his method is to get each item to be joined tinned, then use solder as a mechanical joint. Melt in the solder, remove the iron but hold them together, then once cool, tug on the joint to make sure it holds.
[1] https://build-a-blinkie.org/events.php
You really do need all those little tools, plus a good soldering station, and possibly a hot-air rework station. Get a smoke extractor fan. Learn to use lead-free solder with a small silver component. That gets the melting point down. Visit a place that repairs cell phones and see what they have.
After I finished, the right click felt like it was 'glued down' or 'stuck'...
I never heard the click sound again...
Yep, it was broken.
I've decided never to solder anything ever again...
But good luck to you!
this is not a good pattern!
There are probably some great videos on soldering on YouTube, luckily it's a mature field so not much has changed!
Some random tips...
Lead solder is easier to work with, but with lead free make sure you are using the right flux and temperature.
It helps to preheat things as much as you can. You want to have a hot pad and hot lead, then add solder to that. As opposed to putting a blob of solder on the iron and trying to apply it like glue.
Too much heat can damage the board or part of course.
Use the right tips. Fatter tips can help more evenly apply heat.
If there is a lot of copper like a ground plane, it can take longer to heat.
Watch for cold joints!
Just overall think about getting the parts you want solder on hot, touch solder to it, remove heat.
Don't eat it!
It's probably not gonna be 100% shiny, that's fine, it just has to wet effectively instead of just kind of hovering in a blob.
Lead free is the only thing I use unless I'm repairing some old pre rohs era thing I guess, but I generally don't encounter many of those.
A small USB-C soldering iron supported by IronOS[1], e.g. Pinecil vor TS100
A solid stand with brass wool
A KU soldering tip (looks a bit like a knife) for good heat transfer, too small tips are not good
Thin (<=0.5mm) solder wire
No clean flux (not a pen)
Isopropyl alcohol
Solder fume extractor (DIY is OK, if you're building it right) is good for your health
Solder mat (blue silicone)
Multimeter (not too cheap, around 20 bucks)
Self closing tweezers
Normal tweezers
A wirecutter (blue 5 bucks from ali express)
Manual Desoldering pump (engineer ss03 or a clone for cheaper)
Most important is cleaning (alcohol, then flux) and heat transfer (tin your tip, your pads or your wire before putting things together to ensure good heat transfer). Cleanup nicely and tin your tip after soldering to prevent corrosion.
Optional but helpful for more professional tasks:
Hot air station
Auto Desoldering pump (ZD-8965)
Adjustable power supply (fnirsi usbc, 30 bucks)
Oscilloscope (mini beginner with display Cost around 30 bucks)
Capton tape
Solid Copper wire
1: https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS
Disclosure: Old person. ;-)
Maybe a bit over the top for a lot of situations. I assume folks would acquire these things over a long period of time depending on their projects or what they are repairing. I have a 2-ch function generator coming because after 20 years of bodging stuff together and fixing minor things, I am tired of using the super cheapo one I got back in the day. It takes a while to amass all that crap, but it's fun.
A couple other thoughts: used hemostats are super helpful for a lot of things. for a lot of years I avoided getting any kind of "3rd hand" because I would use combinations of hemostats.
Or jigs- I have a very old piece of wood that has hole drilled for m and f XLR and 1/4 audio connectors with notes about which pin is which. Making tools like that is quite satisfying.
I really enjoy having a stack of stainless steel condiment cups to put screw in- I stack them up during a disassembly and then unstack them as I reassemble.
Also I will say that while I thought building one of those cheap-o oscilloscope kits was a pretty fun practice and I can recommend that, I don't fine them easy enough to use for beginners... the 2-ch Rigol scope I got was not super expensive and felt like the cheapest thing I'd be recommending to folks.
Finally, I have had a lot of mixed successes with desoldering pumps. It took me a long time to figure out that I can only get desoldering braid to work if I put liquid flux on it, but that made it a lot cleaner for me than the solder suckers.
I love this! Automatically sequences the fasteners.
Another option is a piece of corrugated cardboard. Poke the screws into cardboard in the pattern they are in the device you're disassembling.
Yes, but buy several. Maybe it's only because I buy cheap crap ones in the first place, but I treat them as consumables.
Also, 63/37 tin/lead "eutectic" solder is the easiest to use. Wash your hands after using it, or wear gloves. 60/40 solder is almost as easy, and cheaper. Lead-free is more difficult, especially for learning. Learn with lead solder, then switch to lead-free.
Wearing gloves and washing your hands five million times is more annoying than just using lead free.
And even with perfect precautions, the flux expands and makes it spit tiny little balls, which then contaminates your whole work area with a somewhat fine dust.
But in a non-occupational exposure setting you're not likely to have issues if you solder occasionally even with lead solder and don't take any precautions.
RoHS was more about removing lead from electronics as a whole than health risk to an individual from soldering. To put it into perspective, if you lived in a city before the 1990s, you've already inhaled more lead than you ever will from soldering.
Kapton tape
Not supported by any open third party firmware usually, but that's fine with me.
One thing to watch out for is tip grounding, some cheap irons leak a few volts at micro to milliamp level power, relative to ground, which could matter if you solder very sensitive things that are grounded, which you probably don't.
DIY fume extractors are hard to do, you need powerful fans unless you have an arm to put the extractor right above the iron. Also remember that when it's just sitting in the stand, it will still smoke for a few seconds, so the extractor must cover that too.
Those thin wispy activated carbon pads probably aren't doing much, you need actual particulate filtering like a HEPA or similar, but almost anything is better than having the smoke directly in your face with no fans.
The fumes from leaded solder don't themselves contain lead. The iron isn't hot enough to vaporize the metal itself. The fumes are from the flux, and breathing those can be problematic.
The immediate health risk in using leaded solder is all about touch and ingestion. Handling the solder gets lead on your fingers. That in and of itself is not a health risk unless you have a wound. But then if you touch food or mucous membranes (pick your nose, put your finger in your mouth, rub your eyes, etc.), you can get lead in your system. Not much, but once there, it doesn't leave, so accumulates over time.
You can mitigate those risks by wearing gloves, washing your hands immediately after you're done, and being rigorous about not eating or drinking at the bench and not touching other parts of your body. Non of that helps with the environmental problems of using lead, of course.
Its important to people with occupational exposure but as a hobbyist i cant imagine ever soldering enough to get good if i had to set up a fume extractor every time.
why breathe in the fumes or have them get into your eyes?
The ZD-8965 is cheaper (not as high quality but good enough and only around 100 bucks), has a separated station with a very light gun, that is pretty easy to work with and it is significantly smaller more silent than other ZD-* models. Another advantage is that the gun can be replaced for around 25 bucks, so if you ever drop it or it gets leaky, you don't have to invest another 100 bucks.
I used it for desoldering / mill maxing multiple Logitech G515 keyboards with 88 switches (264 solder joints) and I worked through a whole keyboard with one go - no cleaning, no clog, no overheat.
As someone who has only touched one once, heat guns kind of scare me mostly because the airflow is invisible. I have destroyed things with it and almost burned myself. It's hard for me to gauge if you have too much or too little heat on something. Too far away it's doing nothing and too close you're frying a piece, and there is no indication where on that range you are without some learned intuition.
It’s not a hot air soldering station.
After decades of using copper braid, I recently splurged for the 301 and wish I’d done it sooner. My teen kid could effortlessly desolder the button on his worn out gaming mouse with it after 30 seconds of training (me demoing how to use it).
You can buy the Japanese version desolder 1 resistor and solder in two replacements to adapt it from Japanese 100VAC to US 120VAC and save about $100, plus it will remind you how awful desoldering with braid is by comparison. It takes 30 very unhurried minutes at most to do the mod.
Any recommendations for this?
ZEEWEII DSO154Pro to go as cheap as possible for something that is roughly useful
I mainly do ESP circuits and stuff like that, would I ever need anything other than a multimeter if your opinion?
If you’re doing mostly digital circuits, I’d consider a very basic scope for dealing with power supplies and PWMs (but skip the cheapest single channel ones, you’ll want the second channel very soon), and consider getting a separate logic analyzer that can decode common protocols on several channels. You won’t need that if you just work with popular modules though.
In general you probably don't ever need one, if you're not too serious into electronics - that is why I put one in the "more advanced" listing.
I got an SL108 I'm really happy using with my 67W Anker brick (far more convenient than the FX 951 station I had to store + set up every time). I think I could do some precision work with my SL108 but if it became regular or a new project involved it I'd get something smaller, like the TS101 or similar, I guess.
Even for soldering larger 0.1” headers a microscope lets you inspect the joints for cold joints or micro cracks. Those will happen, especially when starting out!
Source: decades-old Lockheed certification for rework on Trident C4 & D5 SLBM G&C boards.
One thing I'd take issue with though is no clean flux for hand soldering. "No clean" formulations are almost universally designed for reflow oven temperature profiles and may not actually meet their specifications for electrical/chemical safety to leave on the board without cleaning when hand soldered. They are also commonly _more_ difficult to clean if you want/need to. Given that non-no clean formulations are likely both easier to clean and more reliable over time when hand soldered, they're my preference for rework.
I'd recommend checking out one of the many youtube channels who do repairs for an idea of the tools and stuff you need. Many have links and most use similar tools.
For $300 in tools from AliExpress you can have a pretty complete setup.
Also, good tools and supplies- kester solder and liquid flux.
It took me quite a while to figure out that my preferences are for desoldering braid that's been soaked with liquid flux- if I use a manual pump it's going to be rough. I am hoping to get a hot air station at some point but I haven't been doing enough work to justify it over my ancient hakko.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL926EC0F1F93C1837&si=srD8...
I have not found a modern resource that explains it better.
Please have a look at PACE soldering/desoldering videos on youtube. They are dated but very good in general. You don't need a lot of videos, just the basics. https://paceworldwide.com/video/basic-soldering-lesson-1-sol...
You don't need to spend a lot of money so I'll keep it simple:
Get yourself a few kits of SMD soldering components and practice. Amazon, AliExpress, whatever.
Some notes on technique:
You will be surprised at the tip size that works well - usually slightly larger is actually better, just need to get comfortable with the angle and size.
Have a magnifying lamp or something like that to help you see better.
You should always use alcohol (70-99% IPA) and flux. Clean everything properly, then flux it, then solder it. Then clean after you're done. Have a few flux pens on hand. MG Chemicals sells these things. You can also get the bottle version and some empty bottles with syringes that mount on top.
Using a "shoe" iron tip is nice because you can angle it between the lead of the component (through-hole) and the pad, and this gives you a little entry way for your solder to flow. The flowing, hot solder will then naturally heat up the rest of the pad. This is a thermal mass effect.
The alternative of having the iron tip on one side of the lead, and the solder wire on the other is not bad either. This makes the solder "flow" across the pad, but it does mean you don't get the thermal mass effect of the first approach. You may need to do this in tighter spaces. Regulate temperature wisely.
For through-hole components, most often the hole itself is plated so it is a double-sided pad, give it an extra 0.5-1s for the solder to go to the other side appropriately.
Make sure you have small wire cutters and nose pliers. The nose pliers are very handy when you need to shape the leads of transistors or chips that have 4-5 legs exactly to the through-hole positioning. Not usual, but not uncommon to see staggered layout.
You will make mistakes. You won't know what you are doing because no amount of tutorials can help here. We have all busted boards for various reasons. Just don't electrocute yourself on high voltage capacitor banks.
For example, you end up with a poor soldering. You try again, and again, but it doesn't get better. Maybe only worse. But what was wrong?
- Was the temperature OK? (And is my iron reporting the real temperature? Should I spend another 300 bucks in a soldering tip thermometer?)
- Maybe the solder I bought is not appropriate?
- Was it the flux? Did I apply it correctly?
- Also, is this tip the best one for the job? Besides, I could have damaged it before when trying to solder and it's not good anymore, although looks good to me
- Or my technique isn't good enough. Am I drag soldering this right? Maybe I should apply heat for longer? But what if I damage the component?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Sb21qbpEQ
The things you want to solder need to be at a minimum temperature for the solder to properly flow.
Parts with a lot of metal attached to it will need more time to get hot. Most notorious are pads connected to a large (ground) plane.
If the solder does not flow properly because of this, increase the time of contact between your soldering iron and the items, add a small amount of solder to the tip to increase contact area. Or use a heat gun in your other hand or a preheater. Or buy a soldering iron with more power.
Flux will help too.
Use a fan to draw the fumes away from you, at a minimum. If you do this on a daily basis, get a fume extractor.
There are many more tips on the internet. The first thing I mentioned is the most important one, imho.
In reality there are multiple factors at play, but a simple and useful abstraction is to think about solder as something that flows more easily to places that are hot. That means the solder always likes to go onto the iron, since that is likely the hottest thing around.
This means your first goal is simply to heat up the places you want to solder far enough so they can melt the solder if you touch them with the solder wire¹.
This usually means heating two things at once: be it two wires you solder together or a pad and the leg of a resistor. That means knowing the geometry of your tip well is useful: How to wedge it in to heat the two things at once. Typically only the shiny, plated bits of the tip are really good at conducting heat². A little drop of solder on the iron can help conduct the heat to a bigger surface, a bit like the fat in a frying pan.
But generally you heat the parts with the iron and then you feed the solder wire into the parts. If they are hot e ough, the solder melts. If not, you wait.
The solder wire typically has a resin-like fluid inside, that helps with soldering as it reduces the surface tension of the metal (this is most of the stuff in the fumes). Capillary effect is the main thing that makes solder flow where you want it to. When the flux is evaporated soldering gets harder, so you may need to add fresh solder after a while or you use flux from a dispenser that you add manually.³
Then there is a lot about logistics. Heated air travels up, on earth solder tends to be affected by gravity and has a tendency to go down (although capillary effects are really the dominant force here), gravity affects parts, wires bend where their material wanta them to etc. The logistics part means: you have only two hands, an iron, solder wire and typically two or more parts that need to be joined.
Being good at soldering is (1) having a good mental model and intuition about how and why the solder flows the way it does and (2) have skill and experience to get the logistics right. The first you can learn to understand, the latter is a matter of practise.⁴
I have thought soldering sucessfully to well over 400 people during the past decade.
¹ This means your iron and tip need to be able to deliver enough heat to heat the parts. If you try to heat up a 200W copper CPU cooler with a 14W soldering iron you can wait forever for the solder to melt. This also has to do with thermal mass and regulation of the iron. Modern irons with modern tips have the temperature probe inside the tip. This helps a ton with avoiding temperature dips when you start to touch something and makes soldering much easier.
² This means keeping tips clean with a proper cleaner literally before every solder joint is crucial. If your tip is toast and has no shiny bit anymore, clean it. If that doesn't help use Ersa Solder Tip Reactivator or buy a new tip. Of course your parts should also be clean (Isopropanol)
³ There are ways to remove excess solder. The simplest being using the right motion with the tip on a coldish joint, making the excess solder stick to the iron and not to the (colder) joint. Other things are spring loaded suction devices (very useful to get solder out of through holes!) and solder wick (very useful to clean old pads)
⁴ There a tools like third hands and so on, and watching some videos by experienced solderers is a good way (nowadays) to learn it, but a steady hand only comes with practise
1. Access to a bunch of different equipment without breaking the bank. Want to try out a bunch of different kinds of flux? See what kind of de-soldering tools are good for different tasks? Now you can!
2. Access to expertise and moral support. Trying to do everything by yourself is no fun. A YouTube video can be helpful but it's no substitute for a knowledgeable friend or more experienced mentor.
I recently did an RTC battery substitution on my Framework laptop's mainboard, and I could do it with confidence because I had good tools and people to consult at my makerspace.