How to maintain the tip on your soldering iron. Tip replacement should not be a regular occurrence! Support the channel: / sdgelectronics Visit my website: www.sdgelectronics.co.uk/ #ElectronicsCreators
I'm very new to soldering but I'm surprised that in all of the how-to videos and beginner soldering videos etc I've watched in the last few weeks I've never once heard someone say to not wipe the tip before putting it back into the holder. Makes perfect sense to me now. I've been mistakenly leaving my tip clean after every use.
This video is exactly what I needed. I'm still inexperienced in soldering so I didn't know how to properly take care of or when to replace a tip. Now I know the reason why my last soldering project was so difficult. Thank you.
Thank you so much. I've always obsessively wiped the tip constantly while soldering and after finishing. It's nice to know the proper way to treat the equipment now.
Thats a great tip that other videos on the same topic dont cover particularly well. We should just call nasty tips rust, it may evoke the understanding of oxidation a bit easier
Many years ago I went on an advanced soldering course. The first lesson was "thou shall NEVER clean your iron tip on a wet/ damp sponge or abrasive of any kind". I was rather taken aback as this is what we had always done. After banishing the sponge / abrasive wool and used denim cloth pieces instead to wipe the iron tips, our iron tips which used to last 2 months if we were lucky, are now 3 years old and still in great shape. The comments on the course were "well why do the soldering iron manufacturers include a cloth?"... answer; they want to sell you lots of tips.
I had a perfectly new tip and a sensor controlled abrasive wool cleaner. I cleaned my tip that much that all the coating went away and now it’s good for nothing. I will try out the denim method. Thanks for sharing.
Could you tell us if there is a specific way to maintain the solder tip with the denim please? Thanks for sharing your experience, If you ever have a link that explains the steps, I'd appreciate it :)!
Nice video - I learned this the hard way and did exactly as had been done in the video with the shared iron. Although, I do believe it was partly to do with buying crappy lead-free high melting point solder. Ended-up using 380 to get anything out of the iron and finished off the tip even faster.
Really helpful, I was wondering why my tips kept dying and the last one so quickly! I was taught wrong back in school and it’s just followed me around! Will have to make a real effort to buck that trend and do this instead!
Hmm, I have never has issues when I cleaned the tip of the soldering iron and then left it that way. But when I started leaving solder on the tip, I had problems since flux in the core burned on the tip and it was really hard to remove it. All this experience was with high quality leaded solder. At the work, where we are not allowed to use leaded solder it is completely different story. No matter what you do to the soldering tip, the tip oxidises, but leaving the solder on the tip alleviates the oxidation a bit. It is very annoying, especially when you need to solder fine pitch components with a blob on the tip.
Thank you for making this video. I was looking for perspective to make sure I was doing it right. I was worried I might be using way too much and wasting solder, or not covering enough and exposing the tip to future oxidation. The tip about not wiping after use and instead wiping before makes sense.
The one possible exception to never raising the temperature is if you're trying to solder a really large pad connected to a ground plane or something like a gold cup or big fat wires for quadcopters. But the answer there is to use a nice big chunky tip and ensure you have enough solder on it to ensure proper thermal contact. This is where the cheap irons will really struggle to keep up; I've had solder freeze on me because the iron simply couldn't deliver enough power to the tip.
Thanks Steve. I usually only use my sponge before I start soldering and before I stop soldering, unless the tip looks pretty dirty. While soldering I normally just use the tip cleaner coils.
Yup, I know this situation all too well. When you come to use the iron, it's set at 400C and the tip is bone dry. I wonder if you have to deal with bend / broken tips at work as well ? :) We use the Weller wxmp, unfortunately they don't take abuse very well, and people tend to use them as a crowbar.
These tips seem to be dead after a few weeks. They get destroyed on those terrible chemical tip cleaners too. People are generally careful, so no bent tips, but just seem to think the tip should be perfectly clean when they have finished. Good to hear from you
I've shared your first video with our ham radio club's email reflector. Our "Builders Group" kicks off its spring season in a few weeks and we have several budding project builders who are novice solderers. We conducted a beginners soldering seminar last week with many first timers melting and making their very first connections. Thanks Steve, look forward to your upcoming series as I'm sure our folks will as well.
Many thanks, very informative, short to the point, which is becoming a rarity on RU-vid! Quick question please, what is the best way to clean up an oxidized tip?
I’m new to soldering and my first tip didn’t even last the whole board so I have to now watch some videos so that my second and final tip won’t go to waste also
My father taught me to clean hot iron tips with a good old fashioned Bayer uncoated aspirin tablet. The salicylic acid does a decent job removing oxidation. It is not the most pleasant smell (smells like burning acid - go figure :-)) but it seems to do the job.
Interesting that you mention 300C to 330C. May I ask, what series of tips do you use on your Metcal? People seem to recommend the 700 series, but their max tip temperature is 413C?(!)
When you put back the soldering iron into the holder with the blob on the tip, the iron is still on and won't it melt the blob away? Or, does it turn off automatically when it is put into the holder? Sorry for the silly question, I am new and frustrated with oxidised tips. It seems to oxidise too quickly.
You can try buying one of these small ammonium phosphate and tin based tip cleaners. Put the tip in there, try to tin it, clean it off. Repeat until it works. That stuff corrodes the iron plating on the tip though, so only use it if you have to. Or, depending on the cost of the tips you're using, maybe it's best to just buy a new one. After your tip works fine again just use brass/copper wool to clean it and/or a sponge with distilled or deionised water, no tap water. And, as said in the video, keep a big blob of solder on the tip when you're done using it to protect it from they oxygen in the air.
Hi I need some help...everytime I solder at around 300° - 350° my soldering tips either shrivel and break off or they melt and break which stops me from soldering....I always re-tin my tips and use flux to clean them when using...does anyone know why this happens? Thanks
I'm new to this...but the way the solder runs away from the oxidized tip seems to be exactly what I need...and that may seem a bit backwards but MY issue is this, my goal is to get the solder to melt onto the circuit boards and not just glob up on my iron. I cannot get it to transfer over for the life of me it's very difficult. I'm trying to install some simple capacitors and for whatever reason the solder wants to stick to my damn iron rather than transferring over to the legs of the capacitor. Even if I try to heat the legs of the capacitors first and then feed the solder onto that, it still doesn't seem to work. So me seeing the solder run away from this iron tip kind of seems like it would be what I want it to do
This tends to be the common bad practice of using underpowered soldering irons and setting the temperature too high to compensate for lack of power. But it gets carried forward :(
Hi. Thanks. So true, never use any abrasive, like sandpaper or or scratch it with the back of a cutter or metal. Do you need to buy those soldering tip refreshing that's powder and comes in a small tin can, by the way? What kind of sponge can be used to wipe it off? Can the dishwater sponge be used? Or there's a special sponge for soldering tips? Thank you. God bless, Revelation 21:4
