Is this the BEST soldering iron for UNDER £20? | Cheap Parkside solder station unboxing and review 

Great review, that was hilarious - loved it! 👍 :) Didn't know they did a mains powered version of this. I was considering getting the battery powered version as I already have a Parkside battery (for my drill.). I imagine it'd be more useful than trying to faff about plugging my mains one in half way across the loft! I'll leave some tips and pointers for soldering here that you may or may not know, there's a few things in the video I can answer as well: - Anything with a frequency (Hz) is AC! - The flux cored wire you bought is for welding (as in TIG / MIG, etc, joining metals together) rather than soldering, so it won't work. Make sure any solder or wire you buy is electrical stuff, not plumbers' or welders' wire. Electrical and plumbers' solder will still have flux in (explained later as to why) but their composition and properties are much different. Make sure you get the right stuff! - Unfortunately we have moved away from using lead based solder in manufacturing and now you're no longer allowed to buy it unless you're a company using it for commercial purposes (lead based solder is more reliable and wayyyyy better for soldering with, although my Draper spool is pretty close to the same quality.) It's not harmful unless you ingest, but all the safety Karens have jumped in again! - As you said, flux or cleaning surfaces to be soldered can help, although generally you shouldn't really need flux, just clean surfaces. A light sanding or scratching is usually good enough and will really help on stuff like track. - Particularly when soldering larger objects like track, it's beneficial to leave the soldering iron on the track to heat it up a bit before you apply the solder to ensure it flows well. You should always apply the soldering iron, allow the surface to heat up, apply the solder, take away the solder, then remove the iron - blobbing solder on like glue results in high resistance and really crusty joints. Obviously the time taken for the work piece to heat up depends on its size - For soldering wire, it is acceptable to apply solder to the wire (called "tinning"), then tin the other wire / surface, then melt them both together. The thing you want to avoid doing is just melting solder on the end of the iron and then just blobbing it all over where you want to solder - the flux core inside the wire boils off before you can make the joint if you do this, so always tin surfaces first. Flux helps to clean the surfaces to be soldered and removes any oxidisation (extra sanding though as before on track etc. still really does help though). Hopefully some of these tips are useful to you (apologies if I've told you something you already know!) Smashing review once again! 👍

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