Soldering Mini-Tutorial

[DrNomis_44]

After a suggestion by Dedman, I have decided to try and duplicate my Soldering mini-tutorial in this thread, in this forum section so it is easier to find.



Mini Soldering Tutorial


Thought I would include a mini-tutorial on Soldering in my STA-1M build diary for anyone who may be interested in improving their soldering skills, now if any of you are already good at soldering, feel perfectly free to humor me, this is mostly for all the newbies at guitar building, I'm going to show you how I was taught to solder while I was doing a Basic Electronics Course through TAFE at the Charles Darwin University here in Darwin in the mid 90's, I also want to add that I have been pursuing Electronics as a hobby since I was 13 years old, I'm now currently 46 years old....my goodness, time certainly flies doesn't it?


Anyway, when you go to do a soldered electrical-connection, there are at least two phases involved, preparation, and then the actual soldering.


Preparation:


When you go to do the preparation prior to soldering, you want to make sure that the two pieces of metal to be soldered are clean, this helps the hot molten solder to stick to, and flow onto the two surfaces to be soldered together, if the solder doesn't stick, or "take" to the surface of the metals this creates what is called a Dry Solder-Joint, this is bad because a Dry Solder-Joint creates a high-resistance electrical connection which can cause bad earthing problems, or can stop circuits from functioning normally like they're supposed to, or, loss of audio signals.


After the surfaces to be soldered are cleaned, there are a further four phases to the preparation prior to the actual soldering, they are:


1, Cut.......Cutting a piece of plastic-insulated wire to length, remembering that it is easier to shorten a wire than to lengthen it, so maybe cut it a bit longer than it needs to be.

2, Strip......Strip a short length of plastic insulation off the end of the wire, for a piece of wire that's going to be soldered to a solder-lug on a pot you can strip off about 4 to 5mm of the insulation, which should be enough.

3, Twist......Some pieces of wire will contain lots of small strands of copper-wire bundled together inside the plastic insulation, what you want to do prior to soldering is to twist the strands together to form a single neat strand, try and twist the wires all together in the same direction.

4, Tin.....To "Tin" the single bundle of twisted copper-strands means to coat the bundle with Solder, this is done to ensure a good solder-joint that is Electrically strong.


I will be posting some pics shortly to illustrate each of the four phases more clearly.


Okay here are some pics to illustrate the four soldering-preparation phases:


Cut:





I used my wire stripping-tool to cut the piece of wire to the required length.



Strip:




I then used my wire-stripping tool to strip about 5mm of plastic insulation off the end of the wire, making sure I didn't completely remove it, then I used the excess insulation to neatly twist the small copper strands together to form one single strand.


Twist:





You can see in the pic how the twisted copper-strands have twisted together neatly, this is what it should look like with no fraying, it should look like a single strand of copper wire.


Finally we come to the Tin-phase:





When you go to tin the wire, first wipe the tip of the soldering-iron on the damp cleaning-sponge, or a damp cotton rag after applying some solder to the tip, this tins the soldering iron tip so it can heat the joint to be soldered more efficiently, when you actually go to tin the wire, use the tip of the soldering iron to heat the copper strands and then apply the solder to both the soldering iron tip and the copper strands, don't apply the solder to the iron tip and use it to transfer the solder to the copper strand because the flux in the solder will have gone up in smoke and won't be able to do it's job.


The job of the flux inside the standard 60/40 Electronic Solder is to boil-off any dirt, grease, and oxidation contaminating the surfaces of the metals to be soldered, if the Flux goes up in smoke before it can do it's job, this could potentially create a dry solder-joint.