Soldering Procedure

If you are practicing on scrap PC, you will perhaps have to remove a few of tis components before soldering them back. Before studying this section do study desoldering tutorial.

Make few practice solder joints by placing some components randomly on the PC board. Before you try to solder, check the joint that is to be soldered. Joint should be sufficiently clean, free of corrosion, and mechanically stable (held in some suitable place). Now Place the soldering iron tip on all of the material that you want to be soldered. If soldering is carried on a PC board, this means the soldering-iron tip should be placed on the PC board foil material, and on the component lead at the same time.

All of the material to be soldered must be heated before they are soldered, if not done, the solder will not adhere properly. When the joint is properly heated, you are ready to apply the solder to the joint (not the soldering-iron tip). Let the solder to flow evenly around the joint, and ultimately flow to the tip. Now remove the unused solder and the all the soldering iron from the joint, and allow it to cool for few mins.

Carefully look the newly soldered joint. The newly soldered joint should look be shiny and smooth, and the connection you made should be strong enough. if on the joint solder balled up, it probably was not hot enough. A rough and gray-looking joint also reflect of improper heating. If you do not tin the soldering iron tip properly, it will not conduct heat that is sufficient for the solderable material. If we have a solder joint that have a poor electrical integrity, it will be referred to as being “cold.” A cold solder joint is also not mechanically solid, either. In order to check that the newly soldered component is tightly bonded together, wiggle it.

The real skill in soldering is its speed at which you can perform it. A skillful person can solder a typical connection in well under five seconds. Heating can destroy a component if heating a connection involves the solid-state components for too long. There are many electronic supply stores that sell aluminum clamp-on heat-sinks in order to conduct substantial amount of the heat away from the component when soldering. But the usefulness and utility of these devices is very limited. Most integrated circuits and many other miniature components typically do not possess an available lead length on-to which to clamp.

When our soldering is heat buildup we need to consider another point. Imagine that we are soldering a component that has eight leads into a PC board. If continue to solder all eight connections, one immediately after another, the component might become very hot due to of the heat buildup. It becomes increasingly warmer with performing each soldering because it did not thoroughly cool from the previous one. The only solution is to allow sufficient time for the component to cool between solderings.