[sdiy] solder questions

[Batz Goodfortune]

Y-ellow Humans. (and Harry)
         Speaking of last desperate acts.

At 12:13 AM 9/10/04 -0700, harrybissell wrote:
>Do you have a proper stand for the soldering iron
>
>I use an old metal stand made by Ungar... It has a V-shaped sheet metal
>base, and a cage to stop you from touching.  The metal is heavy enough
>to
>heatsink the iron when idle.
>
>I do NOT recommend a sponge for cleaning (I use a brush see the previous
>thread).
>Water will waste the tip rapidly.  I usually get about 1-2 years from a
>single tip...

My current tip is now about 6 years old. It's the tip I got when I replaced 
my iron. I finally figured it out...

"Turn the bastard off when you're not using it."

I don't know how long it takes to heat up but it's only in the order of a 
minute or so. It's up to temperature usually before I'm actually ready to 
use it anyway. And bear in mind that the only solder I've got at the moment 
is 60/40 rosen.

The tip doesn't even look like it's a bit old. And I use a sponge and water 
BTW.

But scrapping stuff definitely rips chunks from a soldering iron tip. I 
don't think it's the teflon tip of the solder sucker. I think it's the way 
you have to apply pressure to get the heat in to a joint to suck all the 
solder out. That and the propensity to use a slight chiseling action 
sometimes. As Terry previously mentioned, pre-wetting the joint with a bit 
of fresh solder does the trick. The solder flows and is up to temperature 
already. So it quickly melts the solder underneath and flows through to the 
other side of a plate thru board.

For a more industrial scale ransacking, I use a hot-air paint-stripper gun. 
With a custom nozzle made from an old tin can. Usually once the board 
bursts into flames the parts are easy to remove. :) But I'm told that in 
skilled hands, an oxy set works real well.

>I also use a small can of "Tip Cleaner" ... a sort of solid very thick
>paste that adds
>new tin to the tip.

Never even seen a can of tip cleaner. Does it go well with lemon and lime? 
What's in it? It's probably something commonly available? Like when they 
marketed tape head cleaner as being ultra special stuff when in fact it was 
just isopropyl with a blue dye in it.

>Filing is a last, desperate act :^P

This is exactly what I said to my seventh wife. Or was it my eighth? Which 
one was it that I had beheaded again? I dunno. My past lives are catching 
up with me. Anyway it was the one that gave me syphilis. Or was that a town 
wench?

There's quite a plating process that goes into those tips. If they've been 
made properly of course. But once you punch a hole through it in some 
manner, it's all down hill from there. Acids and water get underneath the 
plating and weaken the surrounding bond. It's like a cancer and it spreads 
rapidly. The plating it self is quite thick and has (as I remember) 3 
layers of different material. I don't quite remember so don't quote me on 
this. I had it explained to me once by the cooper tools guys here. There 
was something about the reactions between the different metals. So you have 
to plate it in one thing first, then put a plate on top of that and finally 
the surface plating will bond.

I'd imagined it to be something like what happens when zink and steel are 
put together. I know this because of the way some Einstein designed and 
built my carport. Which almost fell down because the zink-alum sheeting had 
become a sacrificial anode for the steel rails which supported it. It was 
kinda fascinating because wherever the zink had made electrical contact 
with the steel rails, there were these little square chunks of sheet missing.

Which begs the question. I wonder if a tin of that "Cold Galvanizing" paint 
would help rejuvenate an aging tip? I might try that if this tip ever gets old.

But this would explain why, when salvaging parts, a tip can tend to rapidly 
deteriorate. It probably takes a fair bit of hacking to punch a defect in 
the plating but once that happens, it's all down hill rather rapidly. So 
for small jobs, I've been using the pre-wetting technique and it seems to 
be a lot less traumatic. And you get ALL the stuff out in one suck. (Also 
an idea I put forward to one of my many wives.)

And now ladies and gentle mutants, I have to go form a one mutant chain 
gang to break the rocks in my head. It's just a good thing I have the 
strength of 10 ordinary amoeba.

Be absolutely Icebox.

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