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Grrr... I am still a suckass solderer
ChadTower:
It's a good question. A friend of me gave me an unlabeled spool and said it was electronics solder. My next step is to chuck that and buy some that I know for sure is the right stuff.
RetroACTIVE:
Some of the cheap stuff can have bad flux which actually creates oxidation / deposits on the tip... giving you that black crap... I've seen it before... no matter what you do you can't get rid of it...
ChadTower:
--- Quote from: RetroACTIVE on December 07, 2005, 12:41:54 pm ---BTW:
--- End quote ---
MaximRecoil:
I've never had something refuse to solder unless there was a damn good reason for it. There is no magic to it. If it is clean, there is enough heat, you have flux and solder then it will solder; unless you are trying to solder unsolderable materials.
With wire, it has to be clean obviously. The easiest way to be sure of this is to cut the old exposed wire off and restrip the insulation to expose fresh wire. Twist the two sets of wires to be soldered, together, and put your iron on the bottom and solder from the top, directly to the wire after it is hot enough. If your iron isn't all that hot and the wire is a bit thick, dab a bit of solder directly to the tip of the iron near where the wire is resting, and the molten solder will flow onto the wire and dump its heat into the wire quickly, which will get the wires hot enough to take the solder quicker (at which point you solder directly to the wire as usual). Your iron or the condition of the tip doesn't matter, just as long as it gets hot (gunk on the tip isn't going to insulate it that much. I've resoldered cracked solder joints on a PCB of an old remote control with a flat bladed screw driver heated with a propane torch before and it worked perfectly (I didn't have a soldering iron on hand at the time).
Someone mentioned pipe soldering. I've never had a problem with that either, even with ancient pipes in this 150 year old house of mine. Making sure the pipe and the inside of any new joints you will be adding (elbows, couplers, etc) are clean where you intend to solder is the key, and by clean I mean rough sandpaper or a wire brush so that you expose fresh bare copper (do this to even brand new pipe and joints). Make sure everything is well fluxed, i.e. the outside of the pipe and the inside of any new joints, usually couplers for repair of old pipes. The pipe also has to be completely drained of water; the bread trick that someone mentioned earlier works well, for times when it is difficult or impossible to drain the pipes completely, such as around certain elbows.
vader:
Had to be something with the solder like previous poster said. You can solder or you can't. If iron is hot and tinned, then it is the solder. Just get some rosin core solder from rat shack and you problems will go away. Those ratshack irons are good for the occasional job, but get yourself a good iron if you do solering constantly. I have a Weller WLC 100 which is just a basic solder station that I paid 100 bucks for new...
eBay Link
Pick this up for under 50 now.
Tim
edit by moderator: for goodness sakes, shorten those URLs!
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