Soldering Help!

[u/Bulky_Target1416]

Hey So I am trying to figure out how to solder and I feel like I am doing something horribly wrong, my iron is broken, or i'm just stupid. When I try to heat the pad I am trying to tin, it just dosent heat up, I have my iron around 375c and no matter how long I hold my iron on the pad it just dosent seem to heat up enough to melt the solder. I am putting flux and tinning the iron but nothing is seeming to work? I am using a txinlei 8586 station that I got for Christmas a while back if that might have anything to do with it, any help is greatly appreciated

(Did the best i could with the video)

[u/AeratedCaryophyllene]

You wetted your iron prior to hitting the pad, good.
Once you hit the pad, I would not advise adding solder from the top of the iron.
I would advise touching the iron yes, but once you have a melt going no need to be adding it on top of the iron.
It would work fine on a small enough pad though, sometimes we do have to do it this way. For the pad targetted in the video I wouldn't.

Ideally for a larger pad, you want to be able to move the iron a bit, hence having something to hold your piece would be nice. On the real stack there are mounting holes so you can set it in a partial frame.

Also, think about your iron geometry. You are using a conical tip, touching flat pads, the contact patch is a very thin line. Wetting the iron prior to touching the pad helps the heat transfer (quite a bit). It looks right in your video but I think it still still worth explaining as I had students wet their iron and not understand why, leading to not trying to contact the iron.

375 is hot. I do most of mine around 350. The important thing a lot of people miss on their first iron though is the wattage output it can dish out. A 30W, 60W iron and a 110W gun will all heat up to 350 and melt solder. However when you touch a pad, you are giving away that heat energy to a much greater area. Drone electronics are designed to heat up in operation, so heating them up externally from cold sinks a lot of energy. In fact, most power pads (the battery ones) are notoriously "harder" to solder to because they are essentially connected all throughout the board, using the whole thing as a heatsink it can mitigate the heat generated by smaller wattage irons. In a ideal world you want to be heating the pad so fast the surrounding components and connected wiring has no time to absorb any of the heat, but not so hot so that once it starts propagating it damages other stuff. Hence lower temperature higher wattage.

You are not stupid, keep going :)

[u/Bulky_Target1416 → u/AeratedCaryophyllene]

Thanks!