this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
355 points (99.7% liked)

Dull Men's Club

3962 readers
495 users here now

An unofficial chapter of the popular Dull Men's Club.

https://dullmensclub.com/

1. Relevant commentary on your own dull life. Posts should be about your own dull, lived experience. This is our most important rule. Direct questions, random thoughts, comment baiting, advice seeking, many uses of "discuss" rarely comply with this rule.

2. Original, Fresh, Meaningful Content.

3. Avoid repetitive topics.

4. This is not a search engine
Use a search engine, a tradesperson, Reddit, friends, a specialist Facebook group, apps, Wikipedia, an AI chat, a reverse image search etc. to answer simple questions or identify objects. Also see rule 1, “comment baiting”.

There are a number of content specific communities with subject matter experts who can help you.

Some other communities to consider before posting:

5. Keep it dull. If it puts us to sleep, it’s on the right track. Examples of likely not dull: jokes, gross stuff (including toes), politics, religion, royalty, illness or injury, killing things for fun, or promotional content. Feel free to post these elsewhere.

6. No hate speech, sexism, or bullying No sexism, hate speech, degrading or excessively foul language, or other harmful language. No othering or dehumanizing of anyone or negativity towards any gender identity.

7. Proofread before posting. Use good grammar and punctuation. Avoid useless phrases. Some examples: - starting a post with "So" - starting a post with pointless phrases, like "I hope this is allowed" or “this is my first post” Only share good quality, cropped images. Do not share screenshots of images; share the original image.

.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Figured I would pick up soldiering electronics as a new skill. This is the first thing I created, it works. Any tips or ideas are appreciated!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 60 points 1 week ago (4 children)

The green circled one is a perfect solder joint. The yellow one has a bit too much solder, but its still fine. It was heated enough for the solder to flow around the connections of the work. The red one could be better. It looks like you had a good solder joint when you put that resistor on, but then later it looks like you came back with a solder covered wire to run the connection over to the contact on the right. The fact I'm not seeing deformation of the resistor solder joint when the wire was attached makes me think you might have a cold solder joint there at the resistor for the wire.

Honestly, for this simple circuit all your solder joints are at least passable if not perfect. I doubt this board would ever be in circumstances that any of these solder joints would fail.

A few other things that I've learned over decades of soldering:

  • Soldering is the act of heating the work not the solder. When the work is hot enough, the solder will melt and flow over the connection.
  • Good soldering is moving the heat into the work as efficiently as possible with the shortest time so as to not damage the board or the components. If you place a "dry" iron tip against the work a shockingly small surface area will actually be in contact with the work to transfer heat. Instead "wet" the iron it with just a tiny bit of solder. It will liquefy instantly and sit as a small liquid ball on the tip of your iron. That ball of liquid solder will squish around whatever shape you're applying the tip to providing an excellent thermal bridge to move the heat into the work.
  • All soldering irons have a "heat battery". Here's a bunch of them I circled in green:

Typically inside that section is not only the heating element but a dense piece of material. Usually ceramic but sometimes metals. They all perform the same function. When the heating element heats up, heat is drawn off the element into the dense material in the iron. When you place the tip of the iron on the work, most of the heat is draining from that dense material, and only a bit from the heating element itself.

The consequence to this is that if you're soldering lots of small points back-to-back, or a very large contact just once, you can drain all the usable heat out of the iron and still not bring the work up to the right temperature for solder to flow right. If solder starts acting weird and plastic like after you've solder a bunch of points, simply set the iron back on its rest and wait for a minute or so for the iron to fill its heat battery back up. After that you'll see the solder behaving how you expect.

[–] muse@piefed.blahaj.zone 30 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The part circled in green is also great for removing fingerprints when distracted.

[–] Aganim@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago

They'll come back though, don't ask me how I know.

[–] TheOSINTguy@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Now is it possible for flux to go bad? The stuff I have is about 30 years old.

[–] leds@feddit.dk 1 points 5 days ago

I'd like to know related question , I have some old flux that works beautifully but is probably full of Nash stuff banned by now, should probably buy some new

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Thats a good question. I don't know.

[–] llii@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] Lommy@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

And if you don't have any a good tip will be fine as well.

[–] Leax@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago

Great advice, thank you!