Lads what's the best soldering tutorial you know of? For stuff like making or repairing your own mic and instrument cables. I've watched shitloads but my joints end up looking nightmarish, and what takes the guy on the video seconds to do takes me 5 minutes of trial and error. Is it an equipment issue? I'm using one of those cheap 40w irons that plugs straight into the mains and doesn't have any kind of temperature control.
Would it make more sense to just offer a repair shop like £20 for a quick lesson instead of faffing about with tutorials?
Get a decent soldering iron. I'd go for a Weller with no less than 50 watts, because it'll ensure that your soldering joints will be hot enough to allow the solder to flow evenly. It's going to cost you 40-50 quid, but it's well worth getting quality equipment. Make sure you get a pointy tip with it, because they concentrate more heat in one spot than flat tips, again making soldering easier.
Also, lead free solder is a fucking pain because it needs far higher temperatures and much more accuracy. Although banned for commercial applications, leaded solder is still legal to sell, so try to get some Sn60Pb40 solder (60 percent tin, 40 percent lead) online. Just make sure you don't breathe in too much of it while you are soldering.
Another good way to improve your soldering is to get a proper soldering stand with a magnifying glass and crocodile clamps. It means you'll always have both hands free. You can get one that's going to be enough for the time being for under 10 quid:
It might seem odd, but the best tutorial is this NASA film from 1958. For obvious reasons, NASA really cared about quality solder joints.
Beginners tend to struggle because they're working slowly. By the time they've finished the joint, most of the flux has burned off and the solder starts to oxidise. You can save yourself a lot of grief by having extra flux, so you can re-work a joint as many times as you need just by adding more flux. You can get a jar of knock-off Amtech for about £4 on AliExpress, or a little more on eBay.
I can't improve on the excellent advice already given, but I will have to second getting hold of lead based solder. I've been soldering stuff for 20 years now (fucking hell) and I can modestly say I'm very good at it, but I still sometimes end up fucking up joints on the lead free stuff.
The other thing to say is once you've satisfied yourself with the NASA tutorial, practice is key. Get yourself a bag of resistors and a big square PCB (google practice PCB) and just go at it.
Alright ladm8s thanks for the advice. What's the verdict on my latest handiwork? The mic cable works but for reason the male end looks neater, and I could get a nice solid globule over the connections. I think I may have spent more time cleaning the old solder and was more patient with fiddling with the crocodile clips to get the wires in the right place. Also it looks like there are little bits of exposed copper on the female end - can I leave it like that or is it just going to fuck things up in the long run?
Also what's the yellow shite over my joints? Flux? I'm using some cheap "20g flux-core" lead based solder I bought a decade ago.
Looks OK, but the joint for the red wire on the right could do with a bit more solder to make sure that the wire is fully wetted.
The insulation on a wire will tend to shrink back from the heat of soldering. As long as the length of bare wire isn't long enough to short out on something, it isn't really a problem.
The yellow stuff is flux residue, which is unavoidable. Preferably you'd clean it off with isopropanol because flux is mildly corrosive, but that's more important on PCBs with thin traces than on connectors.
Agree on the red wire. Otherwise, otherlad did a good job.
Sparse solder is normally only a problem when parts move or are subjected to vibration. Like inside a car.
The orthodoxy nowadays of course being that you shouldn't solder connections in a car at all, for those reasons, but I've been doing it for 20 years and I've never had a problem.
>>3320 >>3321 Cheers lads, I'll redo the red wire when my helping hand stand finishes epoxying to an old table top mic stand I had lying around. It was way too flimsy and easy to knock over.
My next soldering job is wiring up an acoustic guitar pickup to a barrel jack, but it looks like I bought a TRS stereo jack by mistake. Presumably I can just use one of the shorter prongs and ignore the other one, but how do I find out which of the shorter prongs is the tip and which is the ring? Usually one is longer than the other.
