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FrozenGate by Avery

Soldering Iron wanted!

Thanks for posting that video sigurth! :beer:
One question though...at some points I see that you take your iron away...do you have a wet spondge or something? :thinking:

Jim

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk
 
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Yep that's when I was cleaning it on the sponge in the station.

I made the video for a client asking how to make traces on pad-per-hole PCB so I didn't annotate it like a full how to. I wish I had a better cam system I'd video an entire PCB prototyping session.
 
I find it easy to make solder bridges in protoboards. Its in the technique on how you make the solder on two pads join together. I can't really explain how I do it but it just works :p

I've moved from wet sponge to the brass wire thing. It cleans better and it doesn't cause thermal shock to the tip prolonging its life.
 
Just received my soldering station from HK. It took 9 days via EMS. I'll do a quick overview on this thing. Excuse the not-so-good pics.

Everything out of the box. The base unit is sturdy enough. The iron holder feels very cheap. Its mostly made out of plastic except the sponge holder which is aluminum. The iron itself doesn't fit in snugly and the nut contacts the plastic on the holder. It came with a sponge but I'm using a brass cleaner.
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The iron feels good and its light too. The rubber grip is soft and comfortable to use. The cord is a bit stiff and short, though. I've changed the tip to a genuine Hakko chisel tip.
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Here is the circuit board. It looks like the typical cheap chinese made boards. I didn't bother with the other side because the pics suck. Soldering quality is okay but there are some hand soldered joints that don't look too good.
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HK sent me the 240V version. The transformer is a little small, I would say.
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Someone wasn't paying attention while soldering. They opted to use an inline fuse holder instead. Its hard to see but the earth wire is soldered directly to a tab on the transformer. Solder quality is horrible and it looks like its a cold joint.
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I've tried to do some soldering and its adequate for most pcb work. However, I had to increase the heat when soldering large components and large gauge wires. Overall, the quality is okay. Not much to complain about since its just a little over $15 for the unit.

I have a question though. The transformer is rated at 240V @ 50Hz. The mains here is 220V @ 60Hz. I assume I would get a lower power output since the voltage is also lower? And what would the different frequency do?
 

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Nope. I think it's the same power. 50Hz trafos run fine at 60Hz but you can't use 60Hz on 50Hz mains or it will saturate and overheat.
 
Yeah, I would reflow any suspect joints in the thing. The only trouble would be that you would have to use
a different soldering iron to do it.

The heat thing is normal. You have to turn up the heat for larger joints to keep the soldering time below 5
seconds, sometimes as much as 200°.

It's a tradeoff between tip life, the time to complete a joint, and heat stress on components. 600° is the
absolute minimum and it goes up from there. Higher temperatures will burn through tips quicker and can
burn parts if you're not careful. Lower temperatures can increase soldering time and burn up parts that
way. Diodes (especially LASER diodes) tend to have very little mass and be the easiest to overheat.
After that it's ICs, then transistors, then aluminum electrolytic capacitors. Everything else is much more
heat tolerant. Good luck burning up a resistor with a soldering iron. (You'd need a blowtorch.)

Don't worry about the transformer. It looks like it's about the right size.
 
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As noted earlier in the thread fast soldering at high temp is better than slow at low temp. I typically run my iron at 330C because it lets me flow a joint in about ~700mS. If I set it to 220C it takes more than 3sec to flow the same small joint and component temperature rises much higher than using a 330C iron.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
For general soldering, I set my iron at 350C. For large copper planes on PCBs, I can go to 400C and even 450C on very big terminal blocks.

I usually stay at 350C or under for long tip life. The nice thing with my '951 is that it drops the tip temp to 200C (sleep mode) when you leave the iron on the stand on a preset amount of time so that the tip lasts longer when it's sitting there doing nothing then it goes back up to the set temp when you lift the handle.
 
Same here, 350C for most pcb work and 400C on big joints. After finally having a temp controlled station, it would take a lot of convincing to get me to use those uncontrolled cheapo irons.

I will also be getting an FX-600 so that I could have something that I could carry around and still is temp controlled.
 
Zeebit and Jim- did y'all ever receive your solder? It went out a while ago, I would have thought it would have definitely made it to y'all by now.

Let me know....
 
Mine came in about a week ago! Again thank you very much! :beer:

Have a nice day,
Jim
 
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