From the course: Learning Soldering for Electronics

Set up a new soldering iron

From the course: Learning Soldering for Electronics

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Set up a new soldering iron

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- So you've decided to get a soldering iron, and you want to set it up to get started. And it's quite easy, but I can give you a couple of tips and tricks before you get started. Hopefully you decided to pick up one with a variable temperature, like this one. Mine is set up to Fahrenheit. Yours can be Fahrenheit or Celsius, and sometimes it actually only is like high and low. And it's a little tricky because there's no exact answer for how you want it to be set up. Now, I have mine set up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit. It could be as low as in the low six hundreds, and it could be as high as upwards of close to 800. It really is your personal preference. The better you are at soldering, typically the hotter you want to run it. Also, depending on how big the components are, if they're very small components, I might turn it down a little bit. I don't want to heat it up that fast. For me, the sweet spot seems to be just about 700 degrees Fahrenheit. So, let's go ahead and turn this on, and I'll show you the display. So this one's actually quite nice. You'll see the temperature comes right up. It's set to 700, and right now it's at 400, 500, and a few seconds from now, it'll be all the way up to 700 degrees. So you've got your sponge that you have set up with some water, if you want to clean the tip. You also, hopefully have the brass sponge, which is even better. This will clean the tip really well, and doesn't remove heat from the tip. So as you're soldering, you can solder, clean, solder, clean. Now when you get your soldering iron brand new, your tips are going to look like this. You can see this one very shiny. It's almost chrome in appearance. And before you solder it, you want to tin them. The easiest way to do it is to turn your iron on. Let me get a close up here. And just take some solder with flux built in, touch it to the tip. And really coat the tip, like really get it everywhere. Blot it off, and now you can see that tip is very shiny. They also sell products, like this tip tinner, that works really well. I don't know if it's necessary, but if you just take this powder right here, and go in there, you can see it almost melts into a solder. And I will say, it does work better. If you look at this right after I clean it, it's really nice and shiny and ready to go. So if you want to go ahead and pick up some tip tinner, go ahead, but you can also get away with just some solder. Just make sure that you coat that whole tip in lots of solder before you start soldering your first connections.

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