Soldering newbie

On Apr 4, 11:03 am, "Michael A. Terrell" <mike.terr...@earthlink.net>
wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:

If the leads are oxidized like that, switching to RA-flux solder will
improve your life.  I have a bunch of old parts that I still use, and RA
is the bomb.


   So is a small solder pot where you can clean & re-tin the leads at
the same time.  I used one for years to clean the pins on used ICs, and
old stock components.  It's easier to deflux loose components than ones
in an assembly.
Remember the old wire-wrap boards? No solder, just simply twist the
wire around the square post and the sharp edges made a gas-dry joint.
I know a guy who sells glue and does an impressive demo at the swap
meets. He glues rubber, glass and metal in seconds and claims you can
twist two wires together and just use his glue without any solder. I'd
like to try some of it, but he sells the stuff for $20 an ounce. But
it is amazing.

-Bill
 
Bill Bowden wrote:
So is a small solder pot where you can clean & re-tin the leads at
the same time. I used one for years to clean the pins on used ICs, and
old stock components. It's easier to deflux loose components than ones
in an assembly.


Remember the old wire-wrap boards? No solder, just simply twist the
wire around the square post and the sharp edges made a gas-dry joint.

Yes, and I remember looking for bad wraps, and having to solder wire
to hundreds of pins when the wire corroded. If you want real fun, try
replacing a bad IC socket where every pin has three levels of wrap, and
most are daisy chained. A repair that would take minutes on a PC board
can take days when you have to remove & replace over a hundred wires.


I know a guy who sells glue and does an impressive demo at the swap
meets. He glues rubber, glass and metal in seconds and claims you can
twist two wires together and just use his glue without any solder. I'd
like to try some of it, but he sells the stuff for $20 an ounce. But
it is amazing.

-Bill
 
On Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:54:35 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
<mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:

Bill Bowden wrote:

So is a small solder pot where you can clean & re-tin the leads at
the same time. I used one for years to clean the pins on used ICs, and
old stock components. It's easier to deflux loose components than ones
in an assembly.


Remember the old wire-wrap boards? No solder, just simply twist the
wire around the square post and the sharp edges made a gas-dry joint.


Yes, and I remember looking for bad wraps, and having to solder wire
to hundreds of pins when the wire corroded. If you want real fun, try
replacing a bad IC socket where every pin has three levels of wrap, and
most are daisy chained. A repair that would take minutes on a PC board
can take days when you have to remove & replace over a hundred wires.
You clearly had incompetent people running the show. If properly
done, WireWrap is as (or more), reliable as soldered connections and
you don't daisy-chain the stuff. You should never have to pull more
than three wires to replace one. At one time mainframes were all
WireWrapped (millions of connections) and were *quite* reliable.
Three-high was a no-no, as well, though that was probably for other
reasons (impedance). The pins were shorter than some, designed for
two wraps only (but a third was easily possible).
 
On Fri, 5 Apr 2013, krw@attt.bizz wrote:

On Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:54:35 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:


Bill Bowden wrote:

So is a small solder pot where you can clean & re-tin the leads at
the same time. I used one for years to clean the pins on used ICs, and
old stock components. It's easier to deflux loose components than ones
in an assembly.


Remember the old wire-wrap boards? No solder, just simply twist the
wire around the square post and the sharp edges made a gas-dry joint.


Yes, and I remember looking for bad wraps, and having to solder wire
to hundreds of pins when the wire corroded. If you want real fun, try
replacing a bad IC socket where every pin has three levels of wrap, and
most are daisy chained. A repair that would take minutes on a PC board
can take days when you have to remove & replace over a hundred wires.

You clearly had incompetent people running the show. If properly
done, WireWrap is as (or more), reliable as soldered connections and
you don't daisy-chain the stuff. You should never have to pull more
than three wires to replace one. At one time mainframes were all
WireWrapped (millions of connections) and were *quite* reliable.
Three-high was a no-no, as well, though that was probably for other
reasons (impedance). The pins were shorter than some, designed for
two wraps only (but a third was easily possible).


I suspect that's some of the issue, the commercial stuff was the mainstay
of wire wrap. I've never heard of much trouble with commercial stuff,
which may mean it was outside the hobbyist realm, or it may mean it works
fine.

Certainly when it hit the hobbyists, about the time Byte arrived, it was
treated as a serious thing, so surely the example of commercial wire
wrappted equipment was there.

But once in the hobby world, it likely wasn't the same thing. Yes, you
could buy actual guns, but for many it was done manually, which I can see
would be a source of trouble. Also, those who hadn't had experience
likely had problems, just like the person beginning to solder doesn't yet
have the experience to know they have bad joints.

I suspect many didn't grasp the concept, and indeed we saw a lot of
intermediate work, wire wrap sockets and wire wrap wire, but a cursory
wrap around the socket pin and then solder, as if people didn't trust the
notion of wire wrapping. I admit that as someone who had already been
soldering, the notion of just twisting the wire around the socket pin
didnt' seem secure.

Michael
 
On Fri, 05 Apr 2013 12:58:44 -0400, krw@attt.bizz wrote:

On Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:54:35 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:


Bill Bowden wrote:

So is a small solder pot where you can clean & re-tin the leads at
the same time. I used one for years to clean the pins on used ICs, and
old stock components. It's easier to deflux loose components than ones
in an assembly.


Remember the old wire-wrap boards? No solder, just simply twist the
wire around the square post and the sharp edges made a gas-dry joint.


Yes, and I remember looking for bad wraps, and having to solder wire
to hundreds of pins when the wire corroded. If you want real fun, try
replacing a bad IC socket where every pin has three levels of wrap, and
most are daisy chained. A repair that would take minutes on a PC board
can take days when you have to remove & replace over a hundred wires.

You clearly had incompetent people running the show. If properly
done, WireWrap is as (or more), reliable as soldered connections and
you don't daisy-chain the stuff. You should never have to pull more
than three wires to replace one. At one time mainframes were all
WireWrapped (millions of connections) and were *quite* reliable.
Three-high was a no-no, as well, though that was probably for other
reasons (impedance). The pins were shorter than some, designed for
two wraps only (but a third was easily possible).
The software for programming a wire-wrap machine was non-trivial. I
did it once.

Read punched cards to get the net list. Each card has an IC or
connector name, pin number, and net name.

Sort all that by net and look for obvious errors.

Read another deck that maps pins to physical coordinates

Do a "traveling salesman" algorithm to minimize wire length in each
net

Sort by level so there are no cross-level wraps

Sort by position to mimimize head travel

Handle color coding, maybe

Output the G-codes and reports.

Wire wrap was awful, in many ways. I don't miss it a bit.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom laser drivers and controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
 
On Fri, 5 Apr 2013 14:03:13 -0400, Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> wrote:

On Fri, 5 Apr 2013, krw@attt.bizz wrote:

On Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:54:35 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:


Bill Bowden wrote:

So is a small solder pot where you can clean & re-tin the leads at
the same time. I used one for years to clean the pins on used ICs, and
old stock components. It's easier to deflux loose components than ones
in an assembly.


Remember the old wire-wrap boards? No solder, just simply twist the
wire around the square post and the sharp edges made a gas-dry joint.


Yes, and I remember looking for bad wraps, and having to solder wire
to hundreds of pins when the wire corroded. If you want real fun, try
replacing a bad IC socket where every pin has three levels of wrap, and
most are daisy chained. A repair that would take minutes on a PC board
can take days when you have to remove & replace over a hundred wires.

You clearly had incompetent people running the show. If properly
done, WireWrap is as (or more), reliable as soldered connections and
you don't daisy-chain the stuff. You should never have to pull more
than three wires to replace one. At one time mainframes were all
WireWrapped (millions of connections) and were *quite* reliable.
Three-high was a no-no, as well, though that was probably for other
reasons (impedance). The pins were shorter than some, designed for
two wraps only (but a third was easily possible).


I suspect that's some of the issue, the commercial stuff was the mainstay
of wire wrap. I've never heard of much trouble with commercial stuff,
which may mean it was outside the hobbyist realm, or it may mean it works
fine.

Certainly when it hit the hobbyists, about the time Byte arrived, it was
treated as a serious thing, so surely the example of commercial wire
wrappted equipment was there.

But once in the hobby world, it likely wasn't the same thing. Yes, you
could buy actual guns, but for many it was done manually, which I can see
would be a source of trouble. Also, those who hadn't had experience
likely had problems, just like the person beginning to solder doesn't yet
have the experience to know they have bad joints.
Unlike most hobbyists, it has to be wrapped tightly. ;-) Seriously,
that's the major problem, getting enough tension on the wire as it's
being pulled around the post so the wire bites into the edges. The
other major problem I saw was stripping. Many would nick the wire.
Bad news for reliability. We had special strippers that looked like
long-nosed pliers with a nick in the jaw (not the blade). Some didn't
know that they were special tools and would use them as long-nose
pliers. One turn of a nut and they were shot. At $100 each, people
got a little protective of their tools.


I suspect many didn't grasp the concept, and indeed we saw a lot of
intermediate work, wire wrap sockets and wire wrap wire, but a cursory
wrap around the socket pin and then solder, as if people didn't trust the
notion of wire wrapping. I admit that as someone who had already been
soldering, the notion of just twisting the wire around the socket pin
didnt' seem secure.
I wouldn't have expected that it was as good as it was, either. It
does take some skill, then so does soldering.
 
On Fri, 05 Apr 2013 11:55:16 -0700, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 05 Apr 2013 12:58:44 -0400, krw@attt.bizz wrote:

On Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:54:35 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:


Bill Bowden wrote:

So is a small solder pot where you can clean & re-tin the leads at
the same time. I used one for years to clean the pins on used ICs, and
old stock components. It's easier to deflux loose components than ones
in an assembly.


Remember the old wire-wrap boards? No solder, just simply twist the
wire around the square post and the sharp edges made a gas-dry joint.


Yes, and I remember looking for bad wraps, and having to solder wire
to hundreds of pins when the wire corroded. If you want real fun, try
replacing a bad IC socket where every pin has three levels of wrap, and
most are daisy chained. A repair that would take minutes on a PC board
can take days when you have to remove & replace over a hundred wires.

You clearly had incompetent people running the show. If properly
done, WireWrap is as (or more), reliable as soldered connections and
you don't daisy-chain the stuff. You should never have to pull more
than three wires to replace one. At one time mainframes were all
WireWrapped (millions of connections) and were *quite* reliable.
Three-high was a no-no, as well, though that was probably for other
reasons (impedance). The pins were shorter than some, designed for
two wraps only (but a third was easily possible).


The software for programming a wire-wrap machine was non-trivial. I
did it once.

Read punched cards to get the net list. Each card has an IC or
connector name, pin number, and net name.
I did that for manual wrap, though used a file (then spreadsheet) for
technician use. They then would put in every other wire in a net,
finally adding the ones in between. That way, if something changed
(or broke), one didn't have to rip the whole net out.

Sort all that by net and look for obvious errors.
I used to do that with PCB netlists. Tools have gotten much better,
though. It's amazing the errors that can be seen by the eye without
looking at the actual data.

Read another deck that maps pins to physical coordinates

Do a "traveling salesman" algorithm to minimize wire length in each
net
Unless order made a difference.

Sort by level so there are no cross-level wraps
Yep. Our techs did that by doing every other wire in a net, then
coming back and fill in the 2nd levels.

Sort by position to mimimize head travel

Handle color coding, maybe

Output the G-codes and reports.

Wire wrap was awful, in many ways. I don't miss it a bit.
I prefer it to dead bug, though it's expensive. I used to have some
pretty complicated WW boards (one with >6000 wires - memory busses
nave lots of wires ;), before PCBs got cheap.
 
On 2013-04-05, Bill Bowden <bperryb@bowdenshobbycircuits.info> wrote:
I know a guy who sells glue and does an impressive demo at the swap
meets. He glues rubber, glass and metal in seconds and claims you can
twist two wires together and just use his glue without any solder. I'd
like to try some of it, but he sells the stuff for $20 an ounce. But
it is amazing.
take some wires, take home a sample glued joint?

--
⚂⚃ 100% natural

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---
 
On 4/5/2013 2:03 PM, Michael Black wrote:
On Fri, 5 Apr 2013, krw@attt.bizz wrote:

On Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:54:35 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:


Bill Bowden wrote:

So is a small solder pot where you can clean & re-tin the leads at
the same time. I used one for years to clean the pins on used ICs,
and
old stock components. It's easier to deflux loose components than
ones
in an assembly.


Remember the old wire-wrap boards? No solder, just simply twist the
wire around the square post and the sharp edges made a gas-dry joint.


Yes, and I remember looking for bad wraps, and having to solder wire
to hundreds of pins when the wire corroded. If you want real fun, try
replacing a bad IC socket where every pin has three levels of wrap, and
most are daisy chained. A repair that would take minutes on a PC board
can take days when you have to remove & replace over a hundred wires.

You clearly had incompetent people running the show. If properly
done, WireWrap is as (or more), reliable as soldered connections and
you don't daisy-chain the stuff. You should never have to pull more
than three wires to replace one. At one time mainframes were all
WireWrapped (millions of connections) and were *quite* reliable.
Three-high was a no-no, as well, though that was probably for other
reasons (impedance). The pins were shorter than some, designed for
two wraps only (but a third was easily possible).


I suspect that's some of the issue, the commercial stuff was the
mainstay of wire wrap. I've never heard of much trouble with commercial
stuff, which may mean it was outside the hobbyist realm, or it may mean
it works fine.

Certainly when it hit the hobbyists, about the time Byte arrived, it was
treated as a serious thing, so surely the example of commercial wire
wrappted equipment was there.

But once in the hobby world, it likely wasn't the same thing. Yes, you
could buy actual guns, but for many it was done manually, which I can
see would be a source of trouble. Also, those who hadn't had experience
likely had problems, just like the person beginning to solder doesn't
yet have the experience to know they have bad joints.

I suspect many didn't grasp the concept, and indeed we saw a lot of
intermediate work, wire wrap sockets and wire wrap wire, but a cursory
wrap around the socket pin and then solder, as if people didn't trust
the notion of wire wrapping. I admit that as someone who had already
been soldering, the notion of just twisting the wire around the socket
pin didnt' seem secure.

Michael
I remember a Grinnell video processor system that they donated to our
lab when I was a grad student, circa 1985. It allowed slow asynchronous
scan data to be turned into video in real time, without the nasty bloom
problems of the Lithicon tube scan converters that some of my colleagues
had been using.(*)

I'd never seen a wire-wrapped backplane before--it just about gave me
nightmares, but apparently it worked fine. The thing was a whole 6 foot
rack, full. Amazing.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) (My scan data was all digital, but then I'd taken a couple of years
off to work as an EE before grad school, besides having an electronics
hobby from an early age.)

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 USA
+1 845 480 2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
M. Hamed wrote:
2) Soldering guides tell you to always heat the joint not the solder.
Whenever I do this, it seems it takes forever for solder to melt. It
also seems that the pointy part of the tip (as they always show in
drawings) isn't really hot enough I have to find a sweet spot on the
tip that is hot enough and then touch it to the wire. Do I just have
a bad iron?
You need a chisel tip instead of that 'pointy' tip.

The point of a conical tip never makes enough contact.


--

Reply in group, but if emailing add one more
zero, and remove the last word.
 
On Apr 4, 11:54 pm, "Michael A. Terrell" <mike.terr...@earthlink.net>
wrote:
Bill Bowden wrote:

   So is a small solder pot where you can clean & re-tin the leads at
the same time.  I used one for years to clean the pins on used ICs, and
old stock components.  It's easier to deflux loose components than ones
in an assembly.


Remember the old wire-wrap boards? No solder, just simply twist the
wire around the square post and the sharp edges made a gas-dry joint.


   Yes, and I remember looking for bad wraps, and having to solder wire
to hundreds of pins when the wire corroded.  If you want real fun, try
replacing a bad IC socket where every pin has three levels of wrap, and
most are daisy chained.  A repair that would take minutes on a PC board
can take days when you have to remove & replace over a hundred wires.
Yes, it could be a problem. I remember a case where we had an
inexperienced person doing a R&D wire-wrap job with little
supervision. Turned out there was a short from +5 to ground, so we
decided to apply a small current from a PS to see if the offending
wire would get hot and reveal itself. We cranked up the PS to about 20
amps and nothing got hot, so we had to throw away the whole board
since there were too many shorts across the PS.

-Bill
 
"Tom Del Rosso"
You need a chisel tip instead of that 'pointy' tip.

The point of a conical tip never makes enough contact.

This vid ( I posted earlier) shows how to use a pointy tip to solder
regular components like 1 amp diodes to a PCB with plated through holes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tuw2ir2JKM8

The side of the tip is used and solder is constantly re-applied to the tip.



..... Phil
 
krw@attt.bizz wrote:
On Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:54:35 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:


Bill Bowden wrote:

So is a small solder pot where you can clean & re-tin the leads at
the same time. I used one for years to clean the pins on used ICs, and
old stock components. It's easier to deflux loose components than ones
in an assembly.


Remember the old wire-wrap boards? No solder, just simply twist the
wire around the square post and the sharp edges made a gas-dry joint.


Yes, and I remember looking for bad wraps, and having to solder wire
to hundreds of pins when the wire corroded. If you want real fun, try
replacing a bad IC socket where every pin has three levels of wrap, and
most are daisy chained. A repair that would take minutes on a PC board
can take days when you have to remove & replace over a hundred wires.

You clearly had incompetent people running the show. If properly
done, WireWrap is as (or more), reliable as soldered connections and
you don't daisy-chain the stuff. You should never have to pull more
than three wires to replace one. At one time mainframes were all
WireWrapped (millions of connections) and were *quite* reliable.
Three-high was a no-no, as well, though that was probably for other
reasons (impedance). The pins were shorter than some, designed for
two wraps only (but a third was easily possible).


Not all wire wrap was done with silver plated Kynar. Some was tin
plated, and the airflow through the equipment pulled dirty air over the
backplane.

Some Chyron video equipment was made with cheap WW sockets. The
wiring was so tight that you couldn't do practical repairs. The only
thing I could do was press good machine pin sockets into the cheaper
sockets to eliminate intermittent. The sockets were packed so tight
that they touched any adjacent socket to cram a lot of chips into a
small space. Three hinged boards, in a small space. I'll bet the
factory wouldn't even try to repair it without cutting wire and
soldering.
 
Phil Allison wrote:
"Tom Del Rosso"

You need a chisel tip instead of that 'pointy' tip.

The point of a conical tip never makes enough contact.

This vid ( I posted earlier) shows how to use a pointy tip to solder
regular components like 1 amp diodes to a PCB with plated through holes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tuw2ir2JKM8

The side of the tip is used and solder is constantly re-applied to the tip.

Yes, you can do it that way, or use the proper width chisel tip to
apply even heat and solder the joint properly by applying the solder to
the joint instead of the tip. We didn't have anything other than chisel
tips in the 100+ temperature controlled Ungar 'Loner' irons at
Microdyne. Even the .015" tips had a flat face so you could heat the IC
leg & pad instead of the solder.
 
<stratus46@yahoo.com
Phil Allison wrote:
"Tom Del Rosso"

You need a chisel tip instead of that 'pointy' tip.
The point of a conical tip never makes enough contact.


This vid ( I posted earlier) shows how to use a pointy tip to solder

regular components like 1 amp diodes to a PCB with plated through holes.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tuw2ir2JKM8

The side of the tip is used and solder is constantly re-applied to the
tip.

I call that work barely adequate and certainly wouldn't consider paying
for it.
** Luckily no one gives a flying fuck what jerk offs like you think.

Several of the joints don't have solder through the hole.

** Not very important.

The basic technique is what needed to be shown and that is OK.


BTW arsehole,

FIX your fucking news reader so it STOPS doubling the line spacing in quoted
material.



..... Phil
 
On Friday, April 5, 2013 10:02:51 PM UTC-7, Phil Allison wrote:
"Tom Del Rosso"



You need a chisel tip instead of that 'pointy' tip.



The point of a conical tip never makes enough contact.





This vid ( I posted earlier) shows how to use a pointy tip to solder

regular components like 1 amp diodes to a PCB with plated through holes.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tuw2ir2JKM8



The side of the tip is used and solder is constantly re-applied to the tip.







.... Phil
I call that work barely adequate and certainly wouldn't consider paying for it. Several of the joints don't have solder through the hole. That cutter belong in the recycling bin. I haven't done work that shoddy since I was in grade school.

 
<stratus46@yahoo.com>

If the result is poor


** But it is not - fuck head
 
On 2013-04-06, Michael A. Terrell <mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:

Yes, you can do it that way, or use the proper width chisel tip to
apply even heat and solder the joint properly by applying the solder to
the joint instead of the tip. We didn't have anything other than chisel
tips in the 100+ temperature controlled Ungar 'Loner' irons at
Microdyne. Even the .015" tips had a flat face so you could heat the IC
leg & pad instead of the solder.
Yep. At the very least, one should get an iron/station that has the
option of changing tips. I can still buy diff temp and tip profiles
for my ancient non heat-adj Weller.

nb
 
On Sat, 06 Apr 2013 16:55:45 +1100, Phil Allison wrote:

Several of the joints don't have solder through the hole.


** Not very important.
Sorry, Phil, I have to disagree. Every quality control manual I know of,
NASA, MIL, etc, in the case of plated through holes, insist on complete
hole filling, plus a fillet each side.

Many PCB designs (mine included) don't have enough pad area to be
satisfactory without solder penetration. Pads large enough to be
viable on their own, waste real estate.

--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
(Richard Feynman)
 

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