Monday, December 3, 2012

Makeshift Soldering Iron

It turns out that temperature adjustable soldering irons are a little difficult to find here. In place of that I tried using a cheap one I found for a little over a dollar. It quickly got too hot and the tip turned black. Solder on the tip beaded up and I couldn't get it to tin correctly. Later I found another soldering iron that was more expensive but I had the same problem. So, I invested in a dimmer switch for lighting and connected my soldering iron to that. After about five minutes smoke came out of the soldering iron and it stopped working. After replacing it I was able to tin it correctly. One thing I noticed is that the iron never gets as hot using the switch as it did without, even when the switch is turned up as high as possible. So far I have done some soldering on my RPN Binary Calculator and it has worked fine. Hopefully this will continue working until I can find a better one. Here is a picture.

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