[Elecraft] I keep burning up tips. What's wrong?

Sun Sep 1 19:59:02 2002

That caught my eye too. Strange behavior in my experience and I taught
soldering techniques to assemblers at the Motorola research labs. That
was in the 50's. Perhaps things have changed, but I'm skeptical. 

We wet the tip sufficiently to allow good, immediate heat conduction to
the joint. The iron is placed on the joint and solder is added
simultaneously to the point where the iron meets the joint so it melts
but melts in contact with the joint. The amount and length of heat was
just as George describes to get a clean flow and a shiny joint. 

The classes I taught were for early PCB assemblies, with large parts
such as were used up until then on point-to-point chassis wiring being
mounted on circuit boards. Some boards were drilled for the leads to
pass through, like the K2 boards, and others had terminals mounted on
the board for the leads to wrap around.  The copper on the drilled
boards lifted very easily from over-heating and there was none of this
fancy green coating to prevent solder bridges. 

The dwell time (time iron/solder is in contact) remained about the same
as it had from the point-to-point days: 3 to 5 seconds MAX. Often a bit
less. (Personally, I stay under 2 seconds on SMC stuff these days). 

Ron AC7AC
K2 # 1289

Been soldering for nearly 60 years and I cannot ever recall putting
solder on the tip and letting it melt "run down to the connection."

Does Kester recommend this technique?

I was taught as a youngster to place the solder on the joint and to heat
both the solder and the joint with the tip, withdrawing the solder and
the tip when enough had flowed into the joint and was fully liquid and
"shiny."

Curious . . .

73/72, George    
Fairview, TX 30 mi NE of Dallas in Collin county EM13qe   
Amateur Radio W5YR -  the Yellow Rose of Texas
In the 57th year and it just keeps getting better!

"G. Beat (W9GB)" wrote:

> Traditionally only rosin core solder (Kester 44) was used. Usually an
> operator will put the solder wire on the tip and let it melt and run 
> down to the connection.  http://www.kester.com/44.html
>
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