I've recently bought some rosin core 60/40 lead solder .8mm and find it terrible to work with. I used to use Savbit 5-core solder but I can't find it locally here in Canada nor on Amazon. I can find it on ebay.ca but $20cdn for a small tube of solder is more than I'd like to spend.
Can anyone recommend a good solder around the .5mm-1mm range? I feel the solder I bought has so little flux in it, it melts to the solder iron but won't remelt very well and hard to get it to flow when tinning wires or pads. I know I can add flux but I didn't need to with the Savbit solder.
The Savbit stuff was just a little tube but it lasted me quite a while and I can't say if it was the 5 cores of rosin in it or not but it flowed really well and just worked fantastic anytime I used it. I assumed all lead based rosin core solder would flow as well but boy I was wrong.
I don't want to just waste more money buying random solder, can anyone point me to some fantastic solder or some multi-core solder? I'll buy the Savbit if I have to, so far bad solder is making for a very frustrating experience.
I like 60/40 from MG Chemicals, get the small guage. 0.025"/23 AWG size is the size I use.
I buy 1 lb rolls locally, usually 3-4 at a time (we assemble a lot of stuff) https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/mg-chemicals/4894-227G/473-1128-ND/2000365
Clean up with 0.9999% anhyrdous alchohol, I buy a gallon bottle every now and then.
You should be heating the component then adding solder to the joint - if you just put solder on the iron, the flux will have evaporated before you reach the joint. - if that is what you are doing...
(You do need the bit wetted slightly before hand with solder to transfer heat into the joint ).
Components need to be clean , if they are slightly corroded , they won’t solder .
Workable solders are eutectic alloys, meaning they melt/freeze cleanly, avoiding a pasty stage
(pastiness can caus unreliable dry joints if there's any movement such as with hand-soldering)
For tin/lead thats 63/37 ratio (not 60/40), for lead-free there are various formulations, some
are non-eutectic and no good for hand-soldering. The 4% silver type is the best in my experience,
its properly eutectic, even though its more expensive (you don't get through loads of solder unless you
are manufacturing, in which case non-eutectic is cheaper and you are using solder-paste and
a reflow oven anyway).
In case you didn't realize normal soaps and detergents aren't much good at removing lead from
the skin, you might want to avoid the risk and use lead-free, in which case avoid the cheap tin/copper
alloys as they are unworkable (gives lead-free a bad name).
When I switched to lead-free I quickly discovered the cheap stuff is rubbish to use, and avoid it.
The other feature of a non-euctectic is the melting point is significantly higher than the freezing point,
so that you have to set your iron much hotter, not a great thing...
And remember, all the components and most likely, your circuit board are tin coated, not solder coated. So you need an active flux to clean the tin coating before the leaded solder will flow onto it.
Rapid80:
I go through it pretty fast, but maybe thats just me.
Also you get some other stuff, such as flux, a couple of small screw drivers
You must have quite a collection of small screwdrivers then!
Rapid80:
, and some wire.
But don't forget the best bonus of all: "Durable Carton Box".
It's disturbing to me that the manufacturer feels the need to make a big deal of the fact that their product comes with a cardboard box, to the point where it gets its own bullet point in the feature list
Rapid80:
Me: "Pffft. Amateurs. Your product is worthless without a durable carton box."
HAHA!
Rapid80:
And yes, I do have a lot of screw drivers. That probably should've been a hint to me to buy something with more solder...
You can never have too many screwdrivers. Despite a lifetime of accumulating mini screwdrivers, I somehow have now found myself with a desperate shortage of the things. My strategy for common items that are always in need is to reach that critical mass where, even though pretty much all of them are hiding at the moment, there are enough of them about my house that the laws of statistics dictate that one of them is bound to be findable after a minimum amount of cursing. I've managed to slip below that threshold with the mini screwdrivers.
Good strategy. Do you have any tips on how to stay organised and keep your room clean? No matter how much I put stuff away or clean up, my room is still messy. Even after a big clean, when I go to work on something the next day, it always goes back to being blown up. I literally can not keep my room clean/organised for more than five days, and that is my record. my average is 3 days.