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Reviving an oxidized tip

neuromodulator

I recently forgot to turn off the soldering station and ended up leaving it on on at 380 °C for around 12 hours. The tip ended up very oxidized and unable to get tin to stick to it. I looked for information on how to "revive" the tip and found a video about it from Androkavo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JADI1N-K9Yc. I tried everything shown there except the sandpaper, the steel wool, the knife and the tip tinner. After a lot of effort, I managed to get a bit of the surface with a more silvery look, but It still could not get solder to stick to the tip. As a last resource I decided to try electrolysis, which I know is quite effective in removing rust, but I was not able to find any info on how good or bad of an idea is to do it with a soldering tip. I left the tip submerged into a beaker with tap water and electrolyzed it for around 5 minutes. After removing it from the bath its color barely changed, so I didn't expect much, but when I tried to put solder into it, tin began to stick into it.

It is unclear to me whether electrolysis caused any damage to the soldering tip, so I do not recommend using this method unless you are willing to take the risk or have more knowledge about chemistry than I do.

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  • I generally never let the tip get bad enough that it would lose enough of its tinned area that it couldn't function well enough as a soldering iron, although I did get close. In my early days, I would keep soldering and over time, the accumulation of flux and heat from the multi-core solder would eventually "grow" the tinned patch to surround the oxidised area and it would flake off (if it was small enough).

    I do have a tip tinner (Multicore TTC-LF) and I have used it all of twice since I purchased it for those really stubborn situations that don't self resolve. It basically has some packed granulated solder with a large proportion of acidic flux to eat through the oxidation and cover it with solder immediately. It does a nice job of cleaning up tips, but you absolutely must clean the tip right away with fresh solder and wet sponge to avoid leaving acid residue which may corrode the tip further or get transferred to circuit boards where it could eat up the traces over time. This is not a treatment that should be regularly done - I've seen some people leave this on their bench and use it every session, but in my opinion, that's a quick way to destroy a tip.

    Nevertheless, the tip in question is on a Tenma combination hot-air and soldering station I've had since 2014. It's still on its first tip, gone through a whole reel of 250g 60/40 and more, and even though the shape of the tip has subtly changed since I started (thinned and flattened at the tip from the original conical profile), it's still working well after all this time.

    - Gough

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  • I generally never let the tip get bad enough that it would lose enough of its tinned area that it couldn't function well enough as a soldering iron, although I did get close. In my early days, I would keep soldering and over time, the accumulation of flux and heat from the multi-core solder would eventually "grow" the tinned patch to surround the oxidised area and it would flake off (if it was small enough).

    I do have a tip tinner (Multicore TTC-LF) and I have used it all of twice since I purchased it for those really stubborn situations that don't self resolve. It basically has some packed granulated solder with a large proportion of acidic flux to eat through the oxidation and cover it with solder immediately. It does a nice job of cleaning up tips, but you absolutely must clean the tip right away with fresh solder and wet sponge to avoid leaving acid residue which may corrode the tip further or get transferred to circuit boards where it could eat up the traces over time. This is not a treatment that should be regularly done - I've seen some people leave this on their bench and use it every session, but in my opinion, that's a quick way to destroy a tip.

    Nevertheless, the tip in question is on a Tenma combination hot-air and soldering station I've had since 2014. It's still on its first tip, gone through a whole reel of 250g 60/40 and more, and even though the shape of the tip has subtly changed since I started (thinned and flattened at the tip from the original conical profile), it's still working well after all this time.

    - Gough

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