Soldering Stations & The Right Accessories - Where to start?

Question

Hi I work at Newark and I'm researching kitting soldering stations and replacement soldering tips together Assuming I start with a Basic Weller 120V 50W Station(WES51 or WESD51 WESD51 What tips sizes or shapes would you recommend for an entry level kit Any thoughts on tinners and sponges to extend tip life What would be the dream starter pack

jw0752 · Answer

Hi Mark, I actually cheated too and I also found this small ceramic thingy at the $ store. It is supposed to be used to heat aromatic oil like a scented candle but I retasked it. I have glued it to a hockey puck and put a nonslip pad on the bottom to keep it from slipping when I clean the solder tip. The concave top is useful for when I want to shake off an accumulation of solder from the tip. John

jw0752 · Answer

Hi Tom, The recommendations that have been tendered so far are all great. I have always bought a variety of tips when I bought a system but as dougw points out they almost never get used and the tip he described is also my preferred tip. I do disagree with using the wet sponge as it cleans the tip too well and one must put a lot of attention into retinning after cleaning. I have used a wire brush or better yet one of the containers with the coiled wire scrubbers. These remove the debris but leave a layer of solder on the tip. http://www.newark.com/weller/wdc2-system/attachable-soldering-tip-dry-cleaner/dp/55M4510 As far as the iron itself is concerned I recently got a Tenma 21-10115 21-10115 as a gift and I am really impressed with it http://www.newark.com/tenma/21-10115/soldering-station-esd-safe-60w/dp/56T2208 John

dougw · Answer

I do all my soldering with the same size tip - it is not practical to swap hot tips all the time. But extra tips of the same type are always useful. The tip should be fairly short and fairly fine to get the maximum heat to the smallest area.

I use a wet sponge for tip cleaning - I don't know if it extends life better, but it cleans better, providing better performance. So a tip cleaner tray for the sponge is essential. A couple of extra sponges would be useful. I also keep a bottle of (preferably DI) water nearby to keep the sponge wet. Like a sports water bottle - so the water can't evaporate between sessions.

Other useful accessories are:

a solder dispenser (stand with an axle for the solder reel)
a magnifier (ideally a stereo microscope) (even jewelers glasses can work)
some lights
a PCB holder
tweezers
solder wick
solder sucker
flux syringe
small nozzle hot air gun
a fume extractor/filter
a third hand
extra solder (two different diameters are useful)

You can find low-cost starter versions of all of these except maybe the fume extractor.

Jan Cumps · Answer

Douglas, for many irons the sponge will do fine. I worked with it from 1982 until a few years ago. I use brass now because that's what the base of my current station (and the previous one) is made for. Also, look at the crazy temperature I'm using . I'm a lead free kind of person.

rsc · Answer

I like to have a large soldering gun at the bench for the times I need to solder some 10AWG to a ground lug and I don't have a propane tank handy. You can make your own tips from 12AWG solid copper in various shapes and sizes also. They don't last as long as the Weller tips, but they will do in a pinch. and a heat gun for shrinking heat-shrink tubing. Scott

michaelkellett · Answer

I've used a stereo optical microscope for years but I find it lees than ideal because: the field of view is too small I have to take my glasses off to look through it, but I need them on to see other things so going from microscope to BOM or parts bins is slow or blurred the posture you end up with hunched over the microscope is OK for an hour but not so good for a 2 day stint So I looked around and got a Mantis Elite in on loan (see Dave Jones review, he loved it) But I hated it - £3k+ but the posture problem is still there, the dealer said I could put the work on a stand but I'd end up working with my hands at chest level like a hamster. Next I looked at camera based systems, Vision Engineering do one, and there are two Swedish companies, but all at the £2k - £5k level. My son suggested a decent camera - you can get a MFT camera which will do 4k video for about £500 an a decent lens will be about another £400. But as a trial and stopgap I bought a Chinese job from Ebay for £180 (could probably have got it cheaper if I had looked around). Its really pretty good in absolute terms and very good for the money. It's much nicer to work with than peering into the stereo microscope, well worth the loss of stereo-ness. I thought it might be hard to get used to not looking at where my hand are but it's not been a problem. The fancy camera project is in hand but I haven't got the bits for the long reach stand yet - so far it's only managed pictures of the dog. MK

genebren · Answer

Accessory wise the Barlow lens and the light ring make my Microscope very useful for solder. When it came to the light ring I ended up building my own. I wanted to work with a combination of full illumination and then various segments in order to make some defects really pop out. With the design I came up with, each of the LEDs (12 total, with each LED package containing 3 individual LEDs) is uniquely controllable. I have modes to select the number of LEDs to turn on and then to rotate the pattern around the ring, one LED at a time. There is also a couple of gradient patterns, where all the LEDs are on, but the intensities ramp across the filed. This was fun project. I even machined the housing out of HDPE plastic.

rachaelp · Answer

Hi Doug,

These are all great tips/ideas!

I'd add that I would have a couple of sizes of solder wick if you work on a mix of boards with very fine vs "regular" size SMD's otherwise you can accidentally remove the really small pads or end up with your solder wick stuck fast to your board! I'd also say that a some decent cutters and small pliers are also fairly essential. I'd also add, if you want as step up from the mechanical pump desoldering sucker then a proper heated vacuum one can be a huge productivity boost if you need to do a lot of desoldering.

I do have a couple of things I think I may disagree on slightly but the second is dependant on usage.

Wet sponge. As John says below, this can have its own issues. I find that tips actually don't last as long using a wet sponge for cleaning, even if you remember to re-tin them with fresh solder after cleaning every time. I believe (but am not 100% sure) it's to do with the thermal shock from repetitive cleaning on a cold/damp sponge causes tiny cracks to appear in the surface which over time cause the tip to degrade. I've seen tips where the surface layer eventually comes off completely and then there is no amount of tinning that will make it work again. I use the dry tip cleaners that look a bit like a gold version of a steel scouring pad you'd find in the kitchen for using on your dishes. The only time I would use a wet sponge is if somebody had done something really horrible with my iron and got melted gunk all over it. Then, after telling them off and banning them from using my solder station ever again, I would use the wet sponge and then re-tin the tip afterwards.
Tip sizes. This really does depend on your usage and the difficulty of changing tips really does depend on your solder station. Both my Metcal setup and the Pace setup I had in my office at work have tips which pull out easily for quick changes and they come with insulated rubber pads for grabbing hold of hot tips to do the change. I don't know about the Wellers but I would have thought they would have similar capability? If your typical usage is always regular through hole 0.1" parts or SMD's which are comparatively large pitch then yes you will probably largely get away with a single tip for most work. As soon as you need to do really fine pitch or tiny SMD parts you need to go smaller and if you do large connectors with big pins or have PCB's with large copper planes and thermal vias then some components can be impossible to work on with the regular size tips used for SMD work and you need something bigger to be able to get enough heat into the joint to get them to reflow properly.

Best Regards,

Rachael

michaelkellett · Answer

Since this thread got going I've happened to buy some new bits and a second Ersa iCon Pico iron and controller. It came with the brass brillo pad bat but I'm not finding it that good. This may be because I've been using a camera microscope to solder under for the first time and can now really see what I'm doing. I've found that a piece of kitchen paper does pretty well for cleaning the needle like tip I've been using. You need to be careful not to burn your fingers, and I've no idea how long the bit will last - but actually I don't care very much - the parts I'm soldering cost way, way more than the bits do. MK

rachaelp · Answer

jadew wrote: You can get the best of both worlds with a microscope with a photo port. Yeah I have been looking at possible trinocular microscope options. Do you have any recommendations? I wish Farnell sold the Amscope ones, if so I would probably have one already! jadew wrote: Personally I prefer looking through the microscope. The level of detail is much higher. Yes I think you are right. Currently I have just a reasonable quality articulated/illuminated magnifier which is OK but not great. Depth perception seems a little wonky looking through that. jadew wrote: That being said, I'm not sure a microscope qualifies for a soldering starter kit . We're engineers/tekkies, we like cool kit and love getting carried away dreaming of kit we'd love in our dream lab setup! There's pretty much no way a conversation about lab equipment can stay completely grounded and on topic! Best Regards, Rachael

shabaz · Answer

Hi Doug!

Awesome list by the way!

Regarding sponge/metal wool, I felt exactly the same way, i.e. surely the coiled metal wool would harm the tip. I don't know the mechanics (I guess the softer metal harms less than the cold water), but it does work amazingly well, and the tips last as long (or longer maybe). By poking into the metal wool a couple of times, it pulls off any debris and wipes it clean. The 'wool' is like thin flat tape, coiled like a phone handset cable after years of misuse! I'm guessing the edges of the flat tape are what are causing the wiping to be successful, and the springiness and thickness of the tape applies the right pressure. I have some small pot of tip cleaner which I've never used since, and several sponges that I've not opened, I really should sell them.

The only slight problem with the metal wool is that it can sometimes catch on the edge between the tip and the element : ( but I can live with that it is just an occasional minor annoyance.

dougw · Answer

I don't mind giving metal wool a try. I have not seen any kind of definitive study of which is better so maybe a proper test is the only way to figure it out. I have only seen theory that the brass which is harder than solder can scape the "solder wetting" off an iron tip, whereas the wet sponge will not remove the solder wetting from the iron. Once the wetting is scrapped off to expose the bare iron, iron oxide will form (accelerated due to high temperature) and iron oxide cannot be re-wetted. If your iron tip doesn't have a uniform solder coating, this is the likely cause. I would like to know from members experience how long tips last using metal wool as a cleaner.

Robert Peter Oakes · Answer

Ditch the sponge and go for that pad of brass, the water in the sponge causes the iron to loose loads of heat and you then have or should wait a few seconds for it to warm again, if you cant ditch it, add the curly wire as an accessory. A large (Heat mass) tip for those PCB's with that overly large capacitor on a ground plane that never wants to leave

dr-jhc · Answer

Regarding iron tips, a lot depends on what you are soldering. I mostly use 3 tips: ~1mm chisel (I use this the most), a fatter chisel 3mm (for bigger things), and a very fine "needle" point (it is almost as sharp as a needle) for getting into very fine pins if needed. I have a few others that I rarely (or never) use. On my Hakko 888D changing tips is very fast and easy, even if they are hot (if you are careful). The most important thing is to get an iron with good, stable temperature control. It makes a significant difference to quality and efficiency of your soldering. And, I would use brass wire, not a sponge - I find it works so much better with no risk of thermal shock to the tip.

ninjatrent · Answer

This conversation sounds like a good reason for an experiment to determine which is ideal for proper soldering tip matainance, sponge or brass wool as method of cleaning solder tip. I currently use a cheap wet sponge pad but have found the brass wool to be very effective when used in the past. A wet sponge works great but the sudden temp changes do not seem like it would be beneficial to the lifespan of the tip, heating element, and any temp sensor the soldering iron might have. The concern with a brass tip cleaner might be some damage to the surface of the soldering tip with extended use.

mcb1 · Answer

Edit: I also use a 100 W soldering gun for wires and other things with a higher thermal mass. I'd go for a higher power gun if I were to buy it again. I'm curious if your iron is temperature controlled. While there is no substitue for power, the ability to keep the temperature close to the desired value means you aren't cooking the solder and then experiencing a drop when it gets loaded. Mark

rachaelp · Answer

ninjatrent wrote: This conversation sounds like a good reason for an experiment to determine which is ideal for proper soldering tip matainance, sponge or brass wool as method of cleaning solder tip. That experiment could take a long time to complete, it's the sort of thing I expect the big soldering station manufacturers may have done but it would be interesting to see this done or maybe try and collect data from a number of people over time and see if there are any trends in how the iron tips last vs how people look after their iron tips. In my experience I have had soldering iron tips have what appears to be an outer coating delaminate after extended use when using a wet sponge but I have never seen this on tips since using the brass cleaner. I'm particular about keeping my tips clean and re-tinning them after cleaning so they don't get any oxidisation and I do this regardless of the cleaning method. I don't have enough data to draw any concrete conclusions about tip life vs cleaning method as the tips I had issues with were from a different soldering station brand than I now use so maybe that's a factor in longevity too. Best Regards, Rachael

michaelkellett · Answer

shabaz wrote: I think michaelkellett system has dual outputs, HDMI and USB by the looks of it, You're right - and I'm using the HDMI connected directly to a monitor. The speed is fine for soldering. I think it's important to actually try the system if you are going to spend a lot of money - my Ebay camera and lens was so cheap that I didn't bother and it works OK, if I hadn't had the demo I might have bought the Mantis and I would not have been happy at all. MK

gam3t3ch · Answer

Well I like soldering rework stations myself but to be honest if I was going to buy another just soldering station Weller would be off the table I would probably check the TENMA 21-10115 21-10115 But this is just my preference As far as tips go I think I use between.03.07 inch on a regular basis The only thing I would suggest that could be added would be a heating element if the part is there Just had mine go on my soldering iron but I had a spare waiting To me the WES51 and WESD51 WESD51 are great units but I think more information on who you are gearing these kits too would be ideal as well But to be fair the best would be the cheapest kit possible and then go from there as far as the addons. I only say that because realistically if I could buy a soldering iron, hot air station, fume extractor, solder, bulb, flux, tweezers, wire cutter, extra tips and elements, hot plate, and ultimately a deslodering iron in a kit just starting out that didn't suck it would be more worth my while. But to me the WR5000M WR5000M is my ultimate which isn't going to happen but would be killer to have Everything comes back to who you are going to be gearing this towards tho. So maybe a bit more info.

mcb1 · Answer

better yet one of the containers with the coiled wire scrubbers I cheated and went and brought a stainless pot scrubber at the local supermarket. It works exactly the same, although it would be better in some form of housing... Mark

Soldering Stations & The Right Accessories - Where to start?

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