How to Solder

Transcript Okay, so let’s talk about hazardous materials and soldering. Now, lead solder contains a hazardous material, lead, which is harmful to health, is known to be a poison. But mainly the risk comes from ingestion. If the solder is eaten or ingested, it can lead to lead poisoning. And that’s a serious risk that …

Transcript So soldering is useful for electronics and joining copper metal. And it’s a process wherein the base metal stays solid and doesn’t melt. The solder itself melts, but the copper stays solid. In that way it’s very, very similar to brazing, which is another technique in that the base metal also stays solid. Now, …

Transcript Sometimes when you’re soldering, you may need to remove a component from the board to rework the board. And for that, we need different tools that will help us with that job. First, we need to decide what kind of component we have to work with. We have service mount components, such as this …

Transcript Shuttering safety really takes place in to many areas. One is heat making sure that we control our shuttering iron making sure that we keep it away from any source of ignition and keep it away from our skin which can burn very easily. And we also need to consider chemical effects because we …

Transcript Flux is a chemical that we use to control oxidation during soldering. It’s a necessary part of the soldering process. However, at the end of the soldering you generally are left with a residue that covers your circuit board, and with enough time the solder flux may actually begin to corrode the parts of …

Transcript As you use your soldering iron you may find that the tip starts to adhere less well to the solder or it starts to show little black sports or discoloration perhaps even a rusty appearance. When that occurs the tin coating on the tip is beginning to deteriorate and you need to refresh it. …

Transcript Soldering and brazing are two techniques of joining metals where the base metal, in the case of electronics which is copper, the base metal doesn’t actually melt and it’s natural to ask how does the solder get inside of the copper if the copper doesn’t melt? Now, copper is a metal that’s not made …

Transcript Now, surface non-components are a little bit different from through-hole devices, in that they don’t have wire leaves that pass through the board. So it’s a little bit more of a challenge to solder them to a circuit board. We have to insure that they are held in place in position of the board …

Transcript Hello my name is Jeff Koskulics. I’m here at the Stevens Institute of Technology in the Light and Life laboratory. I’m a recent graduate, I finished my PhD just this past spring and I’m continuing my research this summer as well. For part of my research I had to develop electronic circuity to measure …

Transcript There are many things that can interfere with the soldering process but we can group them into three main groups. The first is oxidation. The second is heat. And the third is perhaps design or human error. Oxidation occurs naturally with chemical reactions between the metals involved in soldering and the air. Since oxygen …

Transcript When copper sits exposed to air for any extended period of time, the reactive metal will tend to oxidize and form a layer that tends to interfere with the soldering process. And flux will do some part to clean up that oxide and reduce it and make a clean metal surface. But often times …

Transcript What is R-O-H-S? ROHS stands for reduction of hazards substances and in case of soldering, that mainly means lead. Lead is a poisonous heavy metal which is toxic to humans, mostly due to ingestion. If you eat a lot of lead, you may get lead poisoning, and this is common in young children. So, …

Transcript Reflow soldering is the modern mechanism for assembling most printed circuit boards today. Reflow soldering enables mass production at a very rapid rate by allowing placement of the components to be separated from the actual soldering process. In reflow soldering, the pads of the printed circuit boards are first covered with solder paste, which …

Transcript A soldering gun is this device here. This is a handheld version. It’s 230 watt. So it’s a very, very high powered device and this is made for soldering rather heavy pieces. Pieces that you’re not likely to find on a printed circuit board. You may find heavy connectors or pieces of brass or …

Transcript We’ve learned about solder wick and solder sucker and now we’re going to use these devices to remove components from the circuit board. First we’re going to remove this surface mount capacitor. So we’re going to use our solder wick to remove the solder from one of the terminals of the device. To do …

Transcript Sometimes we need to change or remove a component or device on a printed circuit board for many reasons. For example, if we have a device that’s no longer working or we need to change the value of a component. Perhaps to change the frequency of oscillation or some other reason. So we need …

Transcript I have here two different pieces of copper that are from a standard [inaudible 00:09] power supply. One common soldering job might be to put a connector on something like this. This piece of wire has been stripped and sitting out in the air for a long time and I wanted you to see …

Transcript Now as you work with soldering, you may learn of a term called the eutectic point. Eutectic solder is a formulation that has a particular percentage of tin and lead. In this case 63 percent tin, 37 percent lead. At this percentage ratio, solder has a unique property where it has a very low …

Transcript It’s important to be able to have your work piece held by some kind of vice when you’re working with it. It really is very helpful in order to have both hands free to do everything that you need to do when you’re soldering. What we use are these different types of vices to …

Transcript To get started soldering the first thing you’ll need is a soldering iron. I recommend as a first soldering iron that you get something that has temperature control. The package should say temperature control on it. This will enable you to begin working with soldering without worrying about whether you’re iron is too cold …

Transcript For electronic soldering, we typically have to have a temperature that’s a couple of hundred degrees higher than the melting point of the solder that we’re working with. Eutectic solders at about 360, so we’re going to go with something much, much hotter than that, in this case we’re getting good results at 650F, …

Transcript There’s a wide variety of tips that you can choose from in your soldering project. A typical tip that might be useful for general purpose use would be a screwdriver tip with a small screwdriver. This has a flat, 2 flat sides that comes to a chiseled point and that flat side can be …

Transcript The melting point of solder depends upon its particular formulation. In the case of eutectic tin-lead solder, the melting temperature is somewhere around 360 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature becomes a bit higher with different formulations of solder, such as 60/40 tin lead, which may be 10 degrees higher. Higher temperatures can also be expected …

Transcript Now, in order to create a good solder joint it’s important to heat both the work piece that you’re trying to solder, the board that you’re trying to solder it to first before you melt the solder into position. So we place the iron tip on the part and the board so that it’s …

Transcript Okay. Sometimes when you’re in the middle of a soldering job, you’re moving from different part to a different sized part, you may need to change the tip that you’re working with. For example, if you’re working with large parts and you want to go with something a little bit more delicate, you may …

Transcript Circuit boards are used to hold electronic components and to provide a mechanical means of holding them on a space and to connect them together electrically. This is a printed circuit board with different resistors, capacitors, and active circuits in these black packages. The circuit board acts to hold them all together as a …

Transcript Not all solders come with flux inside. As you see here we’ve got two samples of different types of solder. One is rosin core, which has the flux inside of a sheath of solder. On the left we have solid solder which has no rosin flux at all. Some natural questions come up: which …

Transcript The soldering iron has a number of parts that we’ll discuss. First is the iron itself has a handle, which is thermally insulated to allow you to hold it safely without getting a burn. It also has a hot tip, which is thermally controlled by a controller attached by a wire. This allows us …

Transcript Alright. What is soldering? It’s a really good question. Soldering is a process of joining different types of metals. And in the case of electronics we’re really interested in joining copper to, say, a printed circuit board. So we have solder, which is an alloy, usually tin and lead. In order to solder, you …

Transcript A wet sponge is really important in soldering. After you’ve been leaving your soldering iron sitting in its stand for a period of time, the iron tends to form oxides on its surface that will interfere with the heating process of transferring heat from the iron to the work piece. And you can see …

Transcript Flux is a very important part of soldering. Flux is necessary to reduce the oxides that tend to form whenever you have hot metals in contact with the air. In electronics, we use a rosin-core solder or a mild solder or water-soluble solder. Make sure that you choose something that’s not plumbing flux or …

Transcript Solder is a material that is used to join soft metals, such as copper, gold, and silver. In electronics we’re mostly concerned with copper. Most commonly we’re using eutectic solder, which is a combination of tin and lead. This is eutectic solder, this is 63 percent tin, 37 percent lead, and this is made …