While soldering is not that hard, different tasks require different tools. Most of them can be from very cheap to very expensive. As a beginner I'd recommend the following:

A small USB-C soldering iron supported by IronOS[1], e.g. Pinecil vor TS100

A solid stand with brass wool

A KU soldering tip (looks a bit like a knife) for good heat transfer, too small tips are not good

Thin (<=0.5mm) solder wire

No clean flux (not a pen)

Isopropyl alcohol

Solder fume extractor (DIY is OK, if you're building it right) is good for your health

Solder mat (blue silicone)

Multimeter (not too cheap, around 20 bucks)

Self closing tweezers

Normal tweezers

A wirecutter (blue 5 bucks from ali express)

Manual Desoldering pump (engineer ss03 or a clone for cheaper)

Most important is cleaning (alcohol, then flux) and heat transfer (tin your tip, your pads or your wire before putting things together to ensure good heat transfer). Cleanup nicely and tin your tip after soldering to prevent corrosion.

Optional but helpful for more professional tasks:

Hot air station

Auto Desoldering pump (ZD-8965)

Adjustable power supply (fnirsi usbc, 30 bucks)

Oscilloscope (mini beginner with display Cost around 30 bucks)

Capton tape

Solid Copper wire

1: https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS

Yes, and the one thing I'd add is practice. And more practice.Take an occasional macro video so you can remember how that perfect joint felt when you did it.

Source: decades-old Lockheed certification for rework on Trident C4 & D5 SLBM G&C boards.

Most of those is not a must. For me one of the most important thing is Rose alloy and some copper braid for desoldering. Also rosin is one of the best flux available because of guaranteed no corrosion. Also it is best to have not only copper soldering tip for good heat transfer but iron soldering tip as well because it will not get bent when agressively digging some crap.

The fume extractor is completely superfluous to the hobbyist.

Its important to people with occupational exposure but as a hobbyist i cant imagine ever soldering enough to get good if i had to set up a fume extractor every time.

Exactly, I solder outside or under the range hood which in confident is enough for a rare job I do

I do exhaust box fan in the window.

I also recently had to decide what soldering iron to get and I found this video extremely informative https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXGb5q1OTA

I got an SL108 I'm really happy using with my 67W Anker brick (far more convenient than the FX 951 station I had to store + set up every time). I think I could do some precision work with my SL108 but if it became regular or a new project involved it I'd get something smaller, like the TS101 or similar, I guess.

Nice list.

Maybe a bit over the top for a lot of situations. I assume folks would acquire these things over a long period of time depending on their projects or what they are repairing. I have a 2-ch function generator coming because after 20 years of bodging stuff together and fixing minor things, I am tired of using the super cheapo one I got back in the day. It takes a while to amass all that crap, but it's fun.

A couple other thoughts: used hemostats are super helpful for a lot of things. for a lot of years I avoided getting any kind of "3rd hand" because I would use combinations of hemostats.

Or jigs- I have a very old piece of wood that has hole drilled for m and f XLR and 1/4 audio connectors with notes about which pin is which. Making tools like that is quite satisfying.

I really enjoy having a stack of stainless steel condiment cups to put screw in- I stack them up during a disassembly and then unstack them as I reassemble.

Also I will say that while I thought building one of those cheap-o oscilloscope kits was a pretty fun practice and I can recommend that, I don't fine them easy enough to use for beginners... the 2-ch Rigol scope I got was not super expensive and felt like the cheapest thing I'd be recommending to folks.

Finally, I have had a lot of mixed successes with desoldering pumps. It took me a long time to figure out that I can only get desoldering braid to work if I put liquid flux on it, but that made it a lot cleaner for me than the solder suckers.

"stack them up during a disassembly and then unstack them as I reassemble."

I love this! Automatically sequences the fasteners.

Another option is a piece of corrugated cardboard. Poke the screws into cardboard in the pattern they are in the device you're disassembling.

If you have the budget the Hakko desoldering gun is a huge huge improvement over desoldering by hand w copper. I've gone from hating it to desoldering junk to harvest parts because it's so easy.

I don't fully agree. Hakko is high quality, quiet, but also VERY expensive (300+ bucks) and the gun contains the vacuum pump which makes it HEAVY and not easy to work with for longer than a few minutes.

The ZD-8965 is cheaper (not as high quality but good enough and only around 100 bucks), has a separated station with a very light gun, that is pretty easy to work with and it is significantly smaller more silent than other ZD-* models. Another advantage is that the gun can be replaced for around 25 bucks, so if you ever drop it or it gets leaky, you don't have to invest another 100 bucks.

I used it for desoldering / mill maxing multiple Logitech G515 keyboards with 88 switches (264 solder joints) and I worked through a whole keyboard with one go - no cleaning, no clog, no overheat.

How did you learn to use one?

As someone who has only touched one once, heat guns kind of scare me mostly because the airflow is invisible. I have destroyed things with it and almost burned myself. It's hard for me to gauge if you have too much or too little heat on something. Too far away it's doing nothing and too close you're frying a piece, and there is no indication where on that range you are without some learned intuition.

The Hakko desoldering gun he’s talking about is the FR-301 (or close equivalent), which is a soldering iron with a hollow tip that the gun has a vacuum pump that can suck solder out through the hollow tip.

It’s not a hot air soldering station.

After decades of using copper braid, I recently splurged for the 301 and wish I’d done it sooner. My teen kid could effortlessly desolder the button on his worn out gaming mouse with it after 30 seconds of training (me demoing how to use it).

You can buy the Japanese version, desolder 1 resistor, and solder in two replacements to adapt it from Japanese 100VAC to US 120VAC and save about $100, plus it will remind you how awful desoldering with braid is by comparison. It takes 30 very unhurried minutes at most to do the mod.

C245 clones seem to be the new current standard tip format, they're pretty nice.

Not supported by any open third party firmware usually, but that's fine with me.

One thing to watch out for is tip grounding, some cheap irons leak a few volts at micro to milliamp level power, relative to ground, which could matter if you solder very sensitive things that are grounded, which you probably don't.

DIY fume extractors are hard to do, you need powerful fans unless you have an arm to put the extractor right above the iron. Also remember that when it's just sitting in the stand, it will still smoke for a few seconds, so the extractor must cover that too.

Those thin wispy activated carbon pads probably aren't doing much, you need actual particulate filtering like a HEPA or similar, but almost anything is better than having the smoke directly in your face with no fans.

and breathing flux is a far larger concern than leaded solder. Physically getting them somewhere (eating while soldering, not washing hands, etc) is still a problem.

Both lead and lead free solder use the same chemical flux in their core. So you have the same problem with leaded flux cored solder. With the additional problem of lead.

I will say it's important that the soldering iron be temperature controlled. It's especially nice if it's one with the temperature sensing integrated into the tip in a cartridge (like the ones you suggested).

Also, 63/37 tin/lead "eutectic" solder is the easiest to use. Wash your hands after using it, or wear gloves. 60/40 solder is almost as easy, and cheaper. Lead-free is more difficult, especially for learning. Learn with lead solder, then switch to lead-free.

I think there's no real need to learn with leaded anymore now that we have temp controlled irons and better fluxes and such.

Wearing gloves and washing your hands five million times is more annoying than just using lead free.

And even with perfect precautions, the flux expands and makes it spit tiny little balls, which then contaminates your whole work area with a somewhat fine dust.

> Wearing gloves and washing your hands five million times is more annoying than just using lead free.

RoHS was more about removing lead from electronics as a whole than health risk to an individual from soldering. To put it into perspective, if you lived in a city before the 1990s, you've already inhaled more lead than you ever will from soldering.

Flux can be hazardous too, even if your solder is lead-free.

But in a non-occupational exposure setting you're not likely to have issues if you solder occasionally even with lead solder and don't take any precautions.

Strong disagree. Leaded solder is still a ton easier to rework thanks to its lower eutectic melting point.

Oh I forgot... a big magnifier glass (8x to 15x) with an LED light is way cheaper than a microscope and very helpful for small parts soldering (SMD) :-)

I have a microscope, but once you get used to using hot air, you don't need it for soldering, just inspection.

A cheap clip-on macro lens for a phone camera is also good for inspecting things, without the cost+space of a proper microscope.

True but you can do actual work under a stereoscopic microscope. It has a vaunted place on my workbench.

Disclosure: Old person. ;-)

I've got one as well, and I'll say it's extremely nice for removing splinters. I do a bit of woodworking, so it ends up being unexpectedly dual-purpose.

Indeed, I'm the designated family surgeon. I've removed more splinters from people than I can count.

I have a $40 head-mounted thing with integrated light and it's awesome for modern boards.

> Oscilloscope (mini beginner with display Cost around 30 bucks)

Any recommendations for this?

FNIRSI 2C53T for more serious work

ZEEWEII DSO154Pro to go as cheap as possible for something that is roughly useful

And in between? Also what would I really need it for?

I mainly do ESP circuits and stuff like that, would I ever need anything other than a multimeter if your opinion?

The second most important thing is a microscope so you can see and analyze your work!

> A wirecutter

Yes, but buy several. Maybe it's only because I buy cheap crap ones in the first place, but I treat them as consumables.

What are you using them for that consumes them?

If the sharp end chips, you can't get close enough to the things you want to clip.

Cutting wires, mostly.

Interesting, I want to hear the full story.

I use the cheap cutters such as Hakko 170's. They're sharp and convenient but essentially consumable. They're made from a relatively soft steel, and wear out, usually because you cut things that aren't copper. Some components have tinned steel leads.

If you dig through someone's old tool box, you'll find a pair of wire cutters with a half-moon nick in each blade from trying to cut something hard.

Naturally my use of wire cutters is declining, due to surface mount, but some of my boards still have larger through-hole parts, and I make custom cables for this and that during prototyping.

Also, make sure your solder is high quality. I've ordered solder from AliExpress - both leaded and unleaded - and they were terrible.

Any recommendations?

I bought solder locally and it was fine. I don't do much work, so it's lasted until now. But the solder did cost twice as much.

This is just a great starter list. Thank you

Get your self a microscope stand, digital from AliExpress. The 7" screen ones are quite cheap and being able to see up close what you're doing makes all the difference in the world.

>Capton tape

Kapton tape

I understand that there's always a hesitation to invest in what looks like an expensive and large tool, but if there's one thing that I could go back in time and force myself to get years sooner, it's a stereo microscope.

It's the single largest difference between frustrated and feeling like a ninja. You will, quite simply, never regret it.

I recommend this one: https://www.strangeparts.com/a-boy-and-his-microscope-a-love...

That link is unfortunately quite useless, link doesn't work.

You don't need any real educational resources to get good at soldering. Any random primer will do. It's genuinely a simple task that doesn't require a lot of explanation or have a lot of tricks.

What gets you good at soldering is just practice. Solder a lot. A fun and easy way to do this is to pick up those cheap ($5 or less) electronic solder-it-yourself kits and do a bunch of them. Include ones that contain small surface mount parts.

You can also practice desoldering on them, or pick up broken electronics and desolder parts from those.

> managed to desolder and resolder a stick but the controller doesn't turn on anymore.

There's a chance to practice repair (which is a completely different topic from soldering)! Odds are very high the problem is that you've made an unwanted solder bridge or you have a cold solder joint.

> repair (which is a completely different topic from soldering)

Yes. There's repair, rework, build and debugging.

Repair is mostly diagnosis, followed by cleaning and repair of mechanical damage. ICs themselves don't fail much. That's what the original poster is doing.

Rework is mostly careful desoldering followed by new component installation. That's when hot-air rework stations are needed, if you have to replace ICs. This is a "use the right tool for the job" task, where you have little metal heat gun air guides for each IC shape. (I have a bag of those things.)

Building, where you start with a blank board and a supply of components, all with a known-to-work design, is just small scale manufacturing. It takes some skill and training, but the process is simple and repetitive. It's automated in production shops.

Debugging of new board designs requires not just soldering tools but the test equipment to test the thing and an understanding of how it works. This is what electrical engineers and technicians do.

>It's genuinely a simple task

Eh…like the saying goes “there are levels to this sh*t”

If you just want to play around as a hobbyist, sure, it can be treated as a simple task. But if you’re working on, say, space avionics it is much more detailed and complex.

I find watching videos of other people soldering is almost as good as practicing myself.

I get frustrated watching soldering videos online because there are a lot of videos online of people who are really bad at soldering.

This is why I watch videos of challenging repairs, it would be impossible to succeed without being good at soldering.

Or both.

Seconding the practice-kit thing, but for the dead DS4 specifically: before you go hunting the joint you reworked, check whether you lifted a pad or cooked a via near the stick. On those boards the stick pins sit right next to thin traces and a hot iron parked too long will pull the pad up with the pin. Easiest check is continuity from each stick pin to wherever the trace lands, and check 3.3V is present with it plugged in - if the rail is gone you probably bridged something, not broken the stick.

Other thing that got me: no-clean flux residue plus a cheap iron with a bad ground can look like a dead board when it's just leakage. Clean it with IPA and a brush and retest before desoldering anything else.

If you’re wanting to get really serious, there are certification classes. For example, the “j standard” classes are pretty detailed.

https://www.protoexpress.com/blog/ipc-j-std-001-standard-sol...

There are some open source documents that can help you understand the difference between good and not-so-good work. Eg https://nepp.nasa.gov/docuploads/06AA01BA

Like all practical skills, practice!

Soldering new is easier than repair.

Get some dirt cheap ali express electronic kits and solder them up. Or get a load of components and some strip boards. Lead solder is much easier to use.

Basic antex iron. Stand with sponge...dab of solder on the iron, wipe on sponge, push iron against both board and component, feed in solder, admire.

For repair work, you want scrap boards real boards. Desolder all of the components, put them back.

Practice. Buy the fancier stuff once you know why it might be useful.

If you are going to do much soldering you need some kind of extractor. Flux in solder will cause breathing problems fairly quickly.

Ts80p iron is super crazy nice for the price. Heats up really fast and there are a lot of tips out there. I'd say it beats my two soldering stations if you're only doing soldering.

Easy. Get the right tool: https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-solde...

The best resource to learn the basics that I have seen is a "comic book" that was made about 15 years back [1].

It goes over the basics and helps you get going. From there I suggest reading posts, watching videos and just talking to people who solder. Find some bare board kits (or your own kits) and assemble them. Soldering, like welding, is one of those things you can learn to do in a day...but it takes experience to get good at it. A lot of what you do is by "feel".

Once you get a hang of it and would like to be able to inspect your own work find a copy of IPC-610A (there are free PDFs online often, otherwise it is expensive). This gives a visual representation of what is a failure or just a process indicator.

edit: Most important. Do not touch the solder to the iron tip. You heat the joint and touch the solder to that. This is the most common newbie mistake you see.

[1]https://mightyohm.com/files/soldercomic/FullSolderComic_EN.p...

most of the youtube videos for soldering are a waste of time as they focus on the rituals of soldering rather than the rationale.

think of soldering as a thermodynamic and metallurgical system to create a solid mechanical/electrical joint - so while welding is a good analogy, it doesn't really give you a good model on what is going on. to get really good at soldering is to get good at understanding the interplay of the factors involved and then predict/manage them.

fundamental to all this is to recognize that the solder is an alloy with eutectic property -- unlike regular metals/alloys, solder doesn't slowly get mushy and then become a molten liquid; instead, at a precise (band) of temp, it just melts, and then when heat is removed/lowered it instantly solidifies. that is why controlling tip temp is critical first step.

second is the thermal mass of the soldering surface; usb/ethernet connectors have higher thermal mass so to achieve eutectic, you need a beefier tip that can deliver, not a thinner tip and holding it longer; higher than normal temps helps here. for smd led, the opposite applies;

third, is the concept of wettability -- thermodynamic affinity between the molten solder and the solid metal pad; to form a perfect bond between the metals, they must be clean and free of oxides, and applying flux reduces these oxides. High wettability means the solder eagerly spreads out and adheres to the surface rather than forming isolated droplets. That's the working principle when drag soldering.

then there is angle of solder tip, fine motor control, etc -- those are easy to come by. I am not a technician, and I was able to drag solder a lqfp64 with not a lot of trouble. of course, i hate school of hard knocks, so i spent time learning about the process first.

Suggested reading: https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Soldering-Guide-Alan-Winstanley...

Look for professional or IPC training videos (e.g. https://youtu.be/b15MMzb_GWw )

1. Use a soldering iron that can hit 400, and use a needle tip

2. Use leaded solder - lead-free is a pain. If you're not doing this for hours every day, even without ventilation, you'll be fine.

3. Heat the pads you're soldering to, not the solder. I used to tell kids to hold the iron to the pad for a count of three, then feed the solder in.

4. Two additional tools I find helpful - a solder sucker and copper wick.

> 1. Use a soldering iron that can hit 400, and use a needle tip

I have to disagree with that. Almost every time I've been called in to rescue a frustrated novice at the soldering bench (which has happened a lot), I've found them using the thinnest tip they could find with the temperature cranked to 400°C or higher because nothing was melting. It's fine to have an iron that can exceed 400°C (and I can't think of any I've used that couldn't), but that capability should be rarely used.

A heavier tip -- generally the heaviest that will fit between obstacles on the board -- at a lower temperature is much more forgiving.

The small tip has little heat capacity, significant resistance between the thermal reservoir (the heavy body of the tip) and the contact point, and usually very little contact area with the work. That makes the temperature at the joint highly sensitive to tip position, surface contamination, and copper geometry on the PCB. A thick trace or ground plane connection sinks heat from the joint so well that it will never melt, but a small pad on a thin signal trace will quickly get hot enough to detach the pad. Gunk on the board or oxidation of the tip adds more variability. And the high idle temperature makes for fast oxidation of the solder coat on the tip and then the plating, which creates more problems and frustration when you're new and don't recognize those symptoms.

A fat tip provides a large thermal reservoir right at the contact point and usually creates a larger contact area that's less disturbed by a bit of contamination. The much lower thermal resistance brings the joint temperature closer to the iron's thermostat setting, allowing you to keep that setting lower -- I'll go as low as 300°C for SnPb on a not-too-heavily-coppered board, maybe up to 350°C for lead-free. That gives you consistent heating of a wide range of targets and is much less likely to lift pads even with the long dwell times that often happen while a novice is learning. At the low end, it slows tip oxidation enough to make it almost a non-issue. And less flux charring means less gunk on the board to interfere with the next joint.

Predictability makes the whole learning process much smoother, and running small tips at high temperatures creates all sorts of issues that are hard to see or understand until you've got some experience behind you. When in doubt, use more copper before using higher temperature.

Number three is basically the golden rule.

From memory when I ran a production line with soldering stations ventilation is equally (and possibly more) important for lead free solder.

And do it with enough solder on the iron to get good thermal transfer. "Enough" really isn't a lot but it's also not a tip that's been wiped entirely dry. How you hold the tip relative to the via/component lead matters (because you want the liquid solder to help with the thermal transfer).

My suggestion is, don't start with difficult soldering jobs. Instead, start with something easy, such as a kit that's intended to teach old school electronic assembly. For instance, something like a guitar pedal. Or, solder to the relatively plump terminals of IC breakout boards before trying to solder the IC's themselves.

I learned soldering by playing around with electric guitars, amps, cables, etc.

Once you're ready to move up to more difficult things such as PCB repair and surface mount, you'll have acquired the basic skills and knack.

At the basic level, all you need is a soldering iron, some solder, and basic hand tools that you already have if you're into tinkering. The rest of the stuff can come later as needed.

Don't overlook taking a community college course. You'll have access to the latest equipment without having to own it.

Lots of good general soldering tips here. If the DualShock 4 PCB is half as complex as the DualSense PCB, good chance you scratched a trace whole removing the sticks. If you can locate the damaged area you can jump it with a bodge wire (think of it like a wood bridge that broke in the middle so you can't walk across, and you make a small path with planks enough for one person to still cross, restoring the connection). Also make sure you didn't introduce a GND short, you may need to cut a trace in 1 or 2 spots in addition to jumping the damaged area if you did. I had a hell of a time getting out the first analog stick on a DualSense and ended up damaging the PCB. A multimeter in continuity mode is a must here for checking that the signal travels the expected path or finding the issue if it doesn't. It is most likely fixable, it was in my case, though it may take you a few days of troubleshooting. Also I would recommend a desoldering gun if you're going to do this a lot, analog sticks are very difficult to remove with just an iron. Often just the tiniest bit of solder clings to the pins in the holes and it won't budge. A hot air station could also work, but these have a tendency to melt all surrounding plastic before the solder and IMO are a last resort.

Look at the traces that go to the stick or that are near that area, look for scratches.

I learned by doing an 8 hour soldering session, building an open source ECU for an older car. By the end it was easy! Fresh joints in a kit are easier than repair so it’s a better place to start learning temp control etc.

Honestly, just practice with a thing that does not cost a lot of money.

Once you desolder and resolder a full size keyboard multiple times (this is before hot-swap was available), most normal through hole PCB soldering jobs becomes easy.

300C on my TS100 for 63/37 lead (from a cheap brand) for any solder in the past 10 years. No extra flux, clamps or anything, just a wet sponge and an open window (or soldering outside), it sounds very basic but once you know how to solder you can do it anywhere.

For desoldering, a good solder pump will do. If a joint is hard to desolder, add solder and pump it again. You can use solder wick to clean up the hole, or you can just pump it again.

Sure, once you have an actual paying job with disposable income you can get all the nice tools, solder, and all that jazz, but it does not make you better, it just makes it easier.

Though saying that, a Hakko desoldering gun is well worth it - I am still good at using a pump and solder wick, but what a time saver the Hakko is.

I have bought some spare Kester leaded spools in case it gets banned for average the consumer, but nowadays I use lead-free SAC305 solder. It's safer clean-up, the only downside is that it does not look as cool. Also, definitely use an extractor fan for lead-free, the fumes are from lead-free are meant to be way more toxic than leaded - I get a headache from some whiffs compared to many more from leaded soldering (obviously try not to inhale any in the first place!).

You might want to try this: https://appliedinspirations.com

NAVAIR 01-1A-23

https://www.robins.af.mil/Portals/59/documents/technicalorde...

I was a 2M Mini/Micro repair technician for a few years in the Navy. That book was our school and manual.

Hi tosmatos,

Please have a look at PACE soldering/desoldering videos on youtube. They are dated but very good in general. You don't need a lot of videos, just the basics. https://paceworldwide.com/video/basic-soldering-lesson-1-sol...

You don't need to spend a lot of money so I'll keep it simple:

Get yourself a few kits of SMD soldering components and practice. Amazon, AliExpress, whatever.

Some notes on technique:

You will be surprised at the tip size that works well - usually slightly larger is actually better, just need to get comfortable with the angle and size.

Have a magnifying lamp or something like that to help you see better.

You should always use alcohol (70-99% IPA) and flux. Clean everything properly, then flux it, then solder it. Then clean after you're done. Have a few flux pens on hand. MG Chemicals sells these things. You can also get the bottle version and some empty bottles with syringes that mount on top.

Using a "shoe" iron tip is nice because you can angle it between the lead of the component (through-hole) and the pad, and this gives you a little entry way for your solder to flow. The flowing, hot solder will then naturally heat up the rest of the pad. This is a thermal mass effect.

The alternative of having the iron tip on one side of the lead, and the solder wire on the other is not bad either. This makes the solder "flow" across the pad, but it does mean you don't get the thermal mass effect of the first approach. You may need to do this in tighter spaces. Regulate temperature wisely.

For through-hole components, most often the hole itself is plated so it is a double-sided pad, give it an extra 0.5-1s for the solder to go to the other side appropriately.

Make sure you have small wire cutters and nose pliers. The nose pliers are very handy when you need to shape the leads of transistors or chips that have 4-5 legs exactly to the through-hole positioning. Not usual, but not uncommon to see staggered layout.

You will make mistakes. You won't know what you are doing because no amount of tutorials can help here. We have all busted boards for various reasons. Just don't electrocute yourself on high voltage capacitor banks.

I love their videos (came to suggest them actually). That said today's devices are more SMD and microsoldering.. but the metallurgy/chemistry/technical knowledge in PACE videos is helpful nonetheless.

Don't hold the iron by the hot end. I taught my children to solder when they were younger and despite telling them they both did it (once).

My late friend Ward was a strong supporter of Build-a-Blinkie[1] and their mission to teach people to solder by doing.

My friend Jim's been soldering since the 1950s. We solder a lot of things with leads, for this, his method is to get each item to be joined tinned, then use solder as a mechanical joint. Melt in the solder, remove the iron but hold them together, then once cool, tug on the joint to make sure it holds.

[1] https://build-a-blinkie.org/events.php

The US Army Field Manual: https://archive.org/details/TM9-237

My skill went up quite a bit when I started watching Louis Rossmann's explainer videos. He mainly does component level repair of macbooks and he covers his troubleshooting approach and the equipment he uses is nothing you can't replicate at home. I don't bother pulling out microscope for repairs and just stick with magnifying glass.

Old day soldering was much more easy. We had lead in the tin. Today leadless tin makes soldeing very hard. Use flux. Enormous amounts of flux

Find some trash and practice removing parts and soldering them back on first.

Not mentioned here yet but the majority of early soldering attempt failures mostly come from crap irons and crap solder not human issues. You need a decent quality temperature controlled iron and decent quality solder, preferably flux cored if you're doing repairs. Here, I have a second hand Metcal iron which cost less than the much recommended Hakko irons and is orders of magnitude better. Solder, I just use thin 60/40 multicore. Avoid the lead free initially until you have some practice.

Watch soldering videos on youtube. Check the comments to make sure people aren't slating their technique.

Removing some parts, like DIP packages really does need specialist irons with vacuum pumps built in to not mangle them. Desolder braid and solder suckers are absolutely no good for that sort of stuff and tend to lift pads.

Correct, half the skill in soldering is picking a good iron with good tips. After that it's the solder.

Only at the very end does your own soldering skill matter.

With the correct tools and materials soldering can be very easy or with the wrong tools very difficult!

There are probably some great videos on soldering on YouTube, luckily it's a mature field so not much has changed!

Some random tips...

Lead solder is easier to work with, but with lead free make sure you are using the right flux and temperature.

It helps to preheat things as much as you can. You want to have a hot pad and hot lead, then add solder to that. As opposed to putting a blob of solder on the iron and trying to apply it like glue.

Too much heat can damage the board or part of course.

Use the right tips. Fatter tips can help more evenly apply heat.

If there is a lot of copper like a ground plane, it can take longer to heat.

Watch for cold joints!

Just overall think about getting the parts you want solder on hot, touch solder to it, remove heat.

Don't eat it!

The important thing with lead free is you're not looking for the color or texture when inspecting, you're looking for the shape, and absence of any tiny seam or cracks.

It's probably not gonna be 100% shiny, that's fine, it just has to wet effectively instead of just kind of hovering in a blob.

Lead free is the only thing I use unless I'm repairing some old pre rohs era thing I guess, but I generally don't encounter many of those.

Helping Hands! Articulating clips on a heavy base, sometimes with a magnifying glass, to help you keep two objects or two parts of an object at some specific angle/distance/etc. so that all you need to worry about is the fumes.

Exhaust fan! Put your station next to a window, both for light and ventilation.

The principle behind a lot of good advice here is “creating the conditions for solder to naturally go where you want it to”. Cleaning, tinning, preheating are all part of creating those conditions.

So the moment you find yourself fighting or forcing the solder, it’s better to step back and create the right conditions.

The biggest thing for me was just being brave enough to go for it and give it a try, and then learning how to undo your mistakes. Re-do things you’re not happy with with braid, reflow things with flux, etc. I’ve torn vias out of old valuable boards doing restoration, and I learned trace repair and fixed it.

> just being brave enough to go for it and give it a try, and then learning how to undo your mistakes

This is true for most things. Don’t let the naysayers discourage you.

I'll also echo the "practice kit" thing, especially for desoldering- solder stuff on, take it off, do it agin.

Also, good tools and supplies- kester solder and liquid flux.

It took me quite a while to figure out that my preferences are for desoldering braid that's been soaked with liquid flux- if I use a manual pump it's going to be rough. I am hoping to get a hot air station at some point but I haven't been doing enough work to justify it over my ancient hakko.

Build a keyboard. By the end you should be well aware with soldering (and how to remove parts that you put on the wrong side of the PCB).

If you need to remove components with many pads, like connectors, it can be daunting without Low Temp Solder Wire. Chip Quik. Btw, I use acetone for cleaning PCBA's, and actually almost every day, and right now, in a professional R&D lab. Residues of soldering wire, after SMT component removal, before new component gets in - it goes away with cotton bud soaked in ace in a few strokes. Never destroyed anything in my whole professional life, 35+ years now, working in consumer and industrial PCBA repair service. Isopropyl works of course, but slowly, and not so clean pcb stays. Depending on the type of soldering wire. I never use lead-free for repairs. During soldering though hole, you need few seconds to heat up the pcb copper and a component lead. They should be on on the same temp for second or two when solder gets melted around. You can even see pad hole capillary sucking melted solder. I've seen young people soldering THT, by shortly touching component pin and and a pcb pad. This looks baad.

The only way of doing less mistakes with expencive boards is doing more mistakes with crap boards. Soldering literature suggests that a repair man should not do anything except repairing some electronics.

Probably your board has some uncleaned flux which makes some parasitic capacitance which make your board feel dead. Also expencive boards typically have some easy to break signalizers that someone not skilled was here. Visual control is a king.

buy some fun kits, solder them together. Desoldering is kinda the harder part of the job

Get a job where you’re soldering all day, or doing audio repair or something like that. Embrace the fumes. Sloppily test live equipment. Remove and replace amplifier chips on amp boards 8 hours a day. Any company near you importing large amounts of audio or dj or stage equipment from China will need someone doing repairs and QC.

Avoid the Hakko FX-888D soldering station. This device has one of the most bizarrely obtuse interfaces I have encountered in ages, seemingly designed to make basic adjustments as difficult as possible, and to encourage accidental decalibration of its temperature settings with no indication to the user that it has happened. I wish I had returned mine while I had the chance.

Get a soldering practice kit. If you're doing surface mount, get a SMD one. For next level practice, checkout azonenberg's rework challenge: https://github.com/azonenberg/reworkctf. He also has some YouTube video about it.

Right. Search "surface mount soldering practice kit". For about $4, you get a board and some parts to practice on. Get a few of those kits, and keep doing them until the result looks really good. I went through about three of those before I attempted anything real.

You really do need all those little tools, plus a good soldering station, and possibly a hot-air rework station. Get a smoke extractor fan. Learn to use lead-free solder with a small silver component. That gets the melting point down. Visit a place that repairs cell phones and see what they have.

The nasa guides are a great resource. Designed with the knowledge that a bad soldering job can cost lives. Maybe overkill for your average diy, but great for a thorough high-quality deep dive. Here is the reference standard context of that guide (also pdf): https://nepp.nasa.gov/docuploads/06AA01BA-FC7E-4094-AE829CE3...

If you live near a makerspace / hackerspace, I would definitely recommend doing projects there. Mine has a weekly electronics projects and repair night with free access. This has two main benefits:

1. Access to a bunch of different equipment without breaking the bank. Want to try out a bunch of different kinds of flux? See what kind of de-soldering tools are good for different tasks? Now you can!

2. Access to expertise and moral support. Trying to do everything by yourself is no fun. A YouTube video can be helpful but it's no substitute for a knowledgeable friend or more experienced mentor.

I recently did an RTC battery substitution on my Framework laptop's mainboard, and I could do it with confidence because I had good tools and people to consult at my makerspace.

Here’s a great series from Pace Electronics from 1980:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL926EC0F1F93C1837&si=srD8...

I have not found a modern resource that explains it better.

Second this, I learned to solder in my EE program and didn't discover these videos until I was done. I wished I had watched them sooner.

MG chemicals liquid rosin with a needle applicator should be an excellent upgrade from what you’re used to.

For me, as there are so many "variables" when soldering, the most difficult thing is knowing what's wrong.

For example, you end up with a poor soldering. You try again, and again, but it doesn't get better. Maybe only worse. But what was wrong?

- Was the temperature OK? (And is my iron reporting the real temperature? Should I spend another 300 bucks in a soldering tip thermometer?)

- Maybe the solder I bought is not appropriate?

- Was it the flux? Did I apply it correctly?

- Also, is this tip the best one for the job? Besides, I could have damaged it before when trying to solder and it's not good anymore, although looks good to me

- Or my technique isn't good enough. Am I drag soldering this right? Maybe I should apply heat for longer? But what if I damage the component?

The main insight you need to have:

The things you want to solder need to be at a minimum temperature for the solder to properly flow.

Parts with a lot of metal attached to it will need more time to get hot. Most notorious are pads connected to a large (ground) plane.

If the solder does not flow properly because of this, increase the time of contact between your soldering iron and the items, add a small amount of solder to the tip to increase contact area. Or use a heat gun in your other hand or a preheater. Or buy a soldering iron with more power.

Flux will help too.

Use a fan to draw the fumes away from you, at a minimum. If you do this on a daily basis, get a fume extractor.

There are many more tips on the internet. The first thing I mentioned is the most important one, imho.

This gives me flashbacks to the last time I tried to replace the microswitches in my mouse...

After I finished, the right click felt like it was 'glued down' or 'stuck'...

I never heard the click sound again...

Yep, it was broken.

I've decided never to solder anything ever again...

But good luck to you!

you attempted a skilled technique without practice, you were surprised when you screwed it up, and then you quit

this is not a good pattern!

Two tips I learned from Sorin's yt channel:

- Bend the tips

- Don't buy an expensive iron, use a cheap one and assist it with a hot air gun

Sorin is incredibly skilled. Here he is fixing a ribbon cable:

https://youtu.be/P81IG0DZ1kg?t=494

Your specific question is for resources to improve, but there's no royal road to soldering, or geometry, or going to the gym.

The fastest way to make progress is to practice, there is no pill or wiki or video that makes progress faster; if anything those make progress slower.

Soldering is exactly like the gym where attempting to avoid time and sweat invariably results in slower progress than just doing it. Especially if someone is selling something to make it easier, it won't work.

If you've already started as per the post you've likely exceeded the skill level covered by "how to solder electronics.pdf" by the Heathkit company or similar intro level stuff.

The only specific technique I can think of is debugging your own boards. Debugging time is very motivational for avoiding mistakes. You'll find it harder to learn to solder if you repair stuff, easy if you build a kit or two of similar complexity to what you're trying to repair. You'll learn anyway as long as you put in the time and sweat it'll just be more emotionally motivating if you're repairing your own work than repairing someone elses.

I picked up the skill from my granddad when I was a kid. Yeah, 6 year old with a soldering iron, what could go wrong, right? Welcome to eastern Europe. There are really 2 things: good soldering iron(and soldering helping hands kit) and practice. Which takes me to one of my hobbies: drones. Look up a kit called Diatone Mamba soldering practice board. They cost 2-3 bucks, get 10 and you'll get the hang of it in a few hours. Oh and a fume extractor(any old pc fan will do).

I'm going to put in a good word for the SN100C / Sn100+ / SnCuNiGe lead-free solder. It's been my go-to for the past 8 years or so, and it flows almost as nicely as leaded.

The only way to learn is to do the damn thing. You'll eventually figure it out. Tinker around with projects that don't matter but are still rewarding. Like, commit a 555 timer and blinky LEDs to proto board. Then find some kits on tindie that seem interesting but won't break the bank. Wash, rinse, repeat until you're building your own multiprocessor homebrew 6502 computer.

Arguably, the only resource you need to get better at it, is time.

Every next solder makes you better at soldering.

Get through your first 1000 solders as soon as possible, and then keep going. The rest will figure itself out along the way.

You can buy a whole lot of practise kits on Amazon. Start with push-through components and move on to surface-mount if you fancy that.

I'd recommend checking out one of the many youtube channels who do repairs for an idea of the tools and stuff you need. Many have links and most use similar tools.

For $300 in tools from AliExpress you can have a pretty complete setup.

This is fairly close to my own soldering journey.

I'm coming at it with a technical software background and minimal hands-on hardware experience or training.

I found a few things that have made my solder joint better (both mechanically and electrically). These three were the purchases that made the most difference.

The FNIRSI soldering station https://www.fnirsi.com/products/dws-200 There are discussion that the tip isn't grounded and it can damage some sensitive components but I haven't run into this and there are online instructions for grounding it. It's very precise. The tip quickly gets to your target temperature and stays there. That means you don't need to hold the iron steady for a long time while it slowly heats up your whole board. The tip on those is also closer to the handle so it's easier to control. There are better irons but for me, this was an upgrade from a Hakko.

Flux. I got some liquid flux and some flux paste. The paste is a bit less messy but the liquid can get into small cracks better. Both of them make it much easier to get the solder to stick to the metal.

Eutectic solder. Lead solder has a lower melting point than lead-free solder. Eutectic solder takes it a step farther and has a specific formulation so the melting and freezing point are the same. That seems like a technical bit of trivia but it means the solder acts much more like how you intuitively expect it to act.

There are a few other things that have helped

I really like the Omnifixo component holder but it's worth getting something to hold your components stead.

Alcohol and a dispenser https://www.amazon.com/JETEHO-Dispenser-Bottle-Methanol-Cont... Precision tip cotton swabs https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BT8VZ3GQ?th=1 and some cotton balls flux is messy and you need to clean it.

Desoldering pumps look easier but their bad. Get a spool of copper desoldering braid. Get the big once and not those dumb little disks.

A silicon matt. They're cheap, protect your work surface, and keep bitsies from rolling around.

I also learned to technique tricks that made a big difference: 1) The soldering iron should always have solder on it. That not only protects the tip against corrosion, it gives the tip better contact with surfaces so the heat transfers better. 2) Touch your soldering iron to the thing you want soldered and let that heat up the solder, instead of melting the solder and dripping it onto wires.

Troubleshooting: If you see a lot of beading, press the iron more on the component or try some more flux. If you regularly fry components before you get a good solder joint, you may need a hotter iron.

Get a ts101

It makes me look like i know what I’m doing

FYI you're trying to repair surface-mounted components by hand, that's pretty tricky. Most hand soldering is done with through hole components, not surface mounted. Not to say it can't be done, but you're starting on hard mode for sure.

I've taught people to start with surface mount before. It's really worse depending on what you're soldering. A lot of people doing hardware hacking will get tons of mileage just out of being able to solder on a chip with a soic-8 package. That's easy enough that you can learn it on day 1.

This guy's youtube videos are, IMO, incredible: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw4EJfQf0KJXCyQ5qiNlcUg/vid...

For teens ages 13-18, Hack Club is running a free grant program to help kids learn to solder! They can sign up and get a free kit from us at https://solder.hackclub.com/

I highly recommend a desoldering gun, like a Hakko, absolutely life changing if you take stuff apart or repair often.

Also, flux is your friend.

This guy does a lot of videos about what you're trying to do, and explains what he is doing and why: https://www.youtube.com/@JoeyDoesTech

This set of videos from eevblog worked for me.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Sb21qbpEQ

Consider the twist-and-tape method if no one has suggested it yet. It’s inarguably safer and good enough for NASA!

Thanks for the tips everyone, I'm motivated now !

Don't overthink it, seriously. Avoid the fumes, if the joint looks shiny, its probably cool.

I thought I was dogshit at soldering until I got a hakko 888, things got a lot easier after that. I don't care for the usb-c stuff.

You probably cut a trace or lifted a pad. A picture or 7 would have been good

These tips are not complete, but just the problem areas that I think noobs get stuck on:

- understand that different tasks require different amounts of heat. The reason a task is difficult or you ruined a board could be due to your iron not getting hot enough or too hot (traces come up).

- use flux, as others have said

- have proper ventilation, even for lead-free systems, there are plenty of other toxins you are likely exposing yourself to - straight into your lungs - if you solder in an unventilated area. Dont think "it wont happen to me".

- wear eye protection. tiny little beads of molten metal can and do fly up in random directions, especially when soldering wires.

- if you burn yourself, hold the affected area under cold water for 20-40seconds, way longer than you think is necessary. burns keep burning after the heat source is removed.

- get a good soldering iron if you are serious about doing it a lot. I am no expert, but I used a Metcal MX-500 for years. If you can afford it, do it. It was the cadillac of soldering irons. Don't get a $30 RadioShack model and wonder why you can't solder tiny SMT joints.

- get a bright spotlight for doing fine work. to me, the light was more important than magnification. the magnifying glasses just got in the way, and stereo microscopes are probably too expensive for you/most of us.

You could read books on strategy from military campaigns, the Art of War, etc, but if you want to be a good solder the best thing would be to join your local territorial army group.

Are you one of those openAI swarms that got into the wild?

Just solder?

know that unleaded solder needs higher temps to melt and heat both the joint and the plate a little to have a good fix !

I took a local class that really helped but the lesson was really just a basic project that had like 40 solder points. First few barely stuck, last few looked perfect. Just do it over and over and you'll get better pretty quickly.

Is there a local makerspace? They often will have free nights where you can pick up some knowledge with direct supervision. Having someone else watch you is incredibly helpful.

1 milli-Paul of flux. (Or am I mixing things up with Paul Daniels of boardview software fame?)

The variables aren't that hard to learn. The one thing many beginners struggle with is that they don't really get the principles involved. They treat a soldering iron as some sort of heated paint brush and wonder why they can't get the paint off the brush.

In reality there are multiple factors at play, but a simple and useful abstraction is to think about solder as something that flows more easily to places that are hot. That means the solder always likes to go onto the iron, since that is likely the hottest thing around.

This means your first goal is simply to heat up the places you want to solder far enough so they can melt the solder if you touch them with the solder wire¹.

This usually means heating two things at once: be it two wires you solder together or a pad and the leg of a resistor. That means knowing the geometry of your tip well is useful: How to wedge it in to heat the two things at once. Typically only the shiny, plated bits of the tip are really good at conducting heat². A little drop of solder on the iron can help conduct the heat to a bigger surface, a bit like the fat in a frying pan.

But generally you heat the parts with the iron and then you feed the solder wire into the parts. If they are hot e ough, the solder melts. If not, you wait.

The solder wire typically has a resin-like fluid inside, that helps with soldering as it reduces the surface tension of the metal (this is most of the stuff in the fumes). Capillary effect is the main thing that makes solder flow where you want it to. When the flux is evaporated soldering gets harder, so you may need to add fresh solder after a while or you use flux from a dispenser that you add manually.³

Then there is a lot about logistics. Heated air travels up, on earth solder tends to be affected by gravity and has a tendency to go down (although capillary effects are really the dominant force here), gravity affects parts, wires bend where their material wanta them to etc. The logistics part means: you have only two hands, an iron, solder wire and typically two or more parts that need to be joined.

Being good at soldering is (1) having a good mental model and intuition about how and why the solder flows the way it does and (2) have skill and experience to get the logistics right. The first you can learn to understand, the latter is a matter of practise.⁴

I have thought soldering sucessfully to well over 400 people during the past decade.

¹ This means your iron and tip need to be able to deliver enough heat to heat the parts. If you try to heat up a 200W copper CPU cooler with a 14W soldering iron you can wait forever for the solder to melt. This also has to do with thermal mass and regulation of the iron. Modern irons with modern tips have the temperature probe inside the tip. This helps a ton with avoiding temperature dips when you start to touch something and makes soldering much easier.

² This means keeping tips clean with a proper cleaner literally before every solder joint is crucial. If your tip is toast and has no shiny bit anymore, clean it. If that doesn't help use Ersa Solder Tip Reactivator or buy a new tip. Of course your parts should also be clean (Isopropanol)

³ There are ways to remove excess solder. The simplest being using the right motion with the tip on a coldish joint, making the excess solder stick to the iron and not to the (colder) joint. Other things are spring loaded suction devices (very useful to get solder out of through holes!) and solder wick (very useful to clean old pads)

⁴ There a tools like third hands and so on, and watching some videos by experienced solderers is a good way (nowadays) to learn it, but a steady hand only comes with practise

Get one of those training boards and keep repeating till you master it, the trick is to heat the board and you put solder and wire on it, not how most beginners go by heating the solder itself. Flux and other things are there as an aux to help in certain cases. I have been soldering since i was a kid (thanks dad for having the machine) and I use only two tips and some flux occasionally, nothing too crazy and don’t go obsessing over the details or the device brand or such.