Home 25 Feb 2007 03:12 pm
Soldering that doesn’t suck
Oh my God. I just soldered a component onto a scrap of circuit board. Neatly and effectively. On pretty much my first try. It’s not perfect, but it’s acceptable. This is huge!
You have to understand: soldering in middle-school metal shop was, for me, not just a failure but a thoroughly humiliating failure. Big blobs of solder everywhere but the joint, is how I remember it, and getting shouted at by the shop teacher for being such an incompetent and unteachable klutz. None of us were good at it, but I was notably bad. I think I may even have cried over it, though I was no crier; I was that frustrated. Soldering went on my list of things I’m disastrously bad at. Like juggling, I figured, it’s an anti-gift.
But with Josh’s new soldering tools, it’s easy. It’s just plain easy. It almost happens of itself. My mind is thoroughly blown. Now I feel like the guy in Richard Condie’s The Big Snit who goes around sawing everything, except that I want to solder everything.
Take that, seventh grade! Hah! And now I must go solder something.
on 25 Feb 2007 at 3:25 pm 1.Mia said …
Cool!
My attempts at soldering have all been self-taught, and mostly unsuccessful, because nobody wanted to teach me in electronics classes. Something about being afraid I’d hurt myself or something.
on 25 Feb 2007 at 3:56 pm 2.Karen said …
Wow. My memories of 8th-grade electronics class are very similar. It was easy to burn up all of the solder I’d been allotted, so that none of it wound up on my circuit board; and it was only a little bit more difficult to coat the entire circuit board in a lake of conductive metal so that I had to scrap the project and start over. Actually making a gadget that would work? Forget it.
I used up yards upon yards of solder, coated three circuit boards and a T-shirt in the stuff, and finally completed my introductory project, six weeks late, by attaching chunks of solder to the board with Elmer’s glue.
The entire class lasted only two months. I now had two weeks left to complete the “medium” and “advanced” projects — and so I lied to the teacher about having finished all three, and busied myself on the bonus material (drawing networks of NAND gates) for the rest of the class.
Methinks I need to chase down one of those good soldering irons, one of these days. Not that I actually have anything to solder. I’m sure I’ll think of something.
I also sympathize about the juggling. I wonder if there’s special juggling equipment which would help in the same way … balloons, maybe?
on 25 Feb 2007 at 4:06 pm 3.Cam Sculpin said …
That is a great story.
Dunno about the balloons. I tried scarves, and it was even worse. Maybe if someone – or a machine – held my hands and moved them in a juggling fashion, or even actually juggled with my hands in theirs. Maybe.
What Josh and I have been soldering: SpokePOV! So very cool. And probably a good idea for people who go riding in the dark and rain in the dead of winter when nobody expects to see a bicyclist.
on 26 Feb 2007 at 8:56 am 4.catenoid said …
Hmm. I may have to try this thing. Radio Shack soldering irons bit my ass too.