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Originally Posted by Chad Hauris
I would really recommend a soldering station ..... Here is the type we use and it has worked great on everything from tube type equipment to very fine circuit board repair. http://www.cs-sales.net/sl30.html |
That does look like a nice soldering station. Maybe it is time for me to upgrade - I have never used a "real" soldering station before, I just never had access to one. I just have three or four different irons for different work - a small Radio Shack iron for surface mount chips (15 or 20 watt, I forget), then the good reliable 30 watt Radio Shack iron for most everything else (through hole boards, capacitors, monitor/TV boards, etc) and then a big honking 100 watt Radio Shack soldering gun I bought specifically for stuff that needs to be soldered/unsoldered to the chassis itself, like big electrolytics. When you grow up in a small town where Radio Shack is the closest thing to an electronics store, you make do. I've gotten very, very good at using this equipment, and I even have the requisite homemade soldering station made from scraps of wood and a coiled piece of aluminum wire, with a built in outlet that I made when I was like 14. I've built and repaired some very intricate stuff with those cheap Rat Shack irons. That said, I'm sure that it would have been easier to use the real thing. Maybe one of these days... I'm just so used to the non-controlled, front heavy, inexpensive iron. It is nice that the tips cost about a buck though...
-Ian