A quick question on soldering...

digitalwanderer · Sep 4, 2002, 10:56 AM

...like "how do you do it?", or something like that.

I sort of thought that when the boy started kindergarten life would slow down a touch and I'd get a bit of time to play, but I forgot the week of sickness that any kind of mass group exposure always seems to visit on the household. (I think it's selective amnesia, the brain blanks out what it doesn't think the mind can handle.

) The son is better; but my 2 year old daughter, my wife, and myself are all dogging a bit....

So I'm stuck in the house for another few days tending to an attention hungry rugrat....and am going slightly out of my mind again....so I went out and picked up a soldering iron kit from Radio Shack for $7 and decided to have a go at soldering together a new GPU heatsink for my 8500. (I KNOW I can squeeze a bit more out of that core....)

One problem, apparently I suck at it. I just tinned my tip last night, but a bit of experimenting with some stranded & spare copper bits showed me it's a damned bitch to get the solder to go where you want it to be without getting all over.

Now this heatsink I'm building involves about a 2"x2"x1/4" piece of copper that I'm drilling a 10x10 grid of holes in and plan to solder about a 6" piece of stranded #12 into each, then unstrand it in some form of psycho-funkadelic fashion to help better dissipate the heat.

PROBLEM: Currently there is no way in F&CK that I can solder well enough to hit a wire in a hole without nailing a couple of other holes along the way. I was just goofing with the rosin core stuff that came with the soldering iron and hadn't applied any flux in advance, will flux help? Is there anything else I can do to improve my accuracy? Hell, any tips on soldering in general would be just ginger-peachy by me...it's something I've been meaning to learn for years, maybe decades now.

UberLord · Sep 4, 2002, 11:01 AM

Put silicone gel over what you DONT want to solder. Peel it off when done. Repeat process for each hole

Matth · Sep 4, 2002, 04:40 PM

Intstall correct sized bit - OUCH! - bandage fingers, allow iron to cool and then install correct sized bit.

Lightly tin the bit, and then wipe off with a the pad (depends on type, may need to be damp) - carrying solder on the iron will NOT work.

If you are suffering an uncontrollable buildup, you may need thinner solder .

So , iron on first , bridging the joint, solder on second (just enough), then when it flows well, iron off and it should pull into the joint.

For heavier materials, a couple more seconds between iron and solder may help.

The Alternative is to pre-tin both the holes and wires, and then sweat each one in, or heat with a smalt gas torch and insert the wires with suitable tongs.