What’s a good soldering gun to start with?
tibbs90 asked:
I’ve taken classes on thru-hole and some SMT soldering. I just need to get a soldering Iron. I don’t want to spend a whole lot of money I just want to practice some and keep my skills honed. When I was in school, I used a Pace soldering station. It was awesome.
I’ve taken classes on thru-hole and some SMT soldering. I just need to get a soldering Iron. I don’t want to spend a whole lot of money I just want to practice some and keep my skills honed. When I was in school, I used a Pace soldering station. It was awesome.
Try one of these. It is cheap and well built.
The important thing for you is that it is a temperature regulated solder station. It will make like way easier for you as a beginner.
Having said that, I used to work for ten years with unregulated ones and with the right skills one can make very good solder joints with those, too. But it is a lot harder because you have to take the temperature difference between the hot iron and the cooled down one into account.
The second important lesson is that you have to ALWAYS solder with plenty of liquid solder flux. 80% of the visual quality of a solder joint depend on having enough (actually an oversupply for hand soldering) of flux around.
I am an Avionics mechanic and I solder all time. I ussualy use a simple butane powered iron (I don’t know the brand), but it was probably no more than $20. I also have one that cost over $120 and worked about 3 times. I would recomend getting a Craftsman or something like that. It should be more than enough for practice and there are is a wide selection of tips available. I would get one myself, but the portable one that I was issued has been working just fine for the past year and a half. The most important things are to keep it cleen and don’t turn the heat up more than you need (it will burn up the tip).
Look for two characteristics for any soldering equipment going to be used at the board level, temp. control and EOS/ESD controls.
With surface mount devices (SMT) you have no leads on many devices, so the device gets the full heat during the soldering process. As such, you need to know that when you set it to 625F (maximum) it won’t go hotter.
Next. Many low grade irons have leakage from the heater circuit that appears on the soldering iron tip (and to your components). Irons which have an EOS/ESD rating (electrical over-stress and electro-static discharge) are designed with a redundant ground connection out to the solder tip itself.
If you’ve already got an iron at home, you can use a $30 digital meter from Radio Shack to verify the tip is grounded (2 ohms or less to earth ground), when switched off. And when switched on, use the Voltage function, and see what voltage is on that tip.
The best soldering systems ever made are from the Metcal family, and are the standard for the aerospace industry. But at about $1K each, not needed for most of us at home. By the way, one of these with a bad ground connection, like from a bad recepticle will have 74 VAC on the solder tip. A lot more than any SMT parts can handle (and you wouldn’t know it since the iron works perfectly when ungrounded).
Look at Wassco tools for wide selection. Expect to spend $100-150 for one that will last your lifetime. And order some extra flux, it does make everything go better.
A temperature controlled soldering iron is a must
and a decent solder sucker
But for SMD you really need hot air iron and a range of adaptors to direct the air at the pins
(There was one advertised in CPC that was affordable
…to be ordered in Jan)
The URLS that 2 contributors gave are ok for Thru’ hole work
but no use for SMD (you can get by if you use two conventional soldering irons)
radio shack sells a no-frills 30 watt soldering iron kit for about eight bucks. it’s no good for smt, but it’s cheap.