How do you feel about soldering?

Dec 26, 2016
2 min read

Soldering...

I have a love/hate relationship with soldering.

On the one hand: I love seeing a nice smooth line. I get super excited about it. Like... way more excited than I probably should. It takes a lot of work to get to the point where your lines are looking good and you feel proud of them. It takes tons of time and practice. So it's a real big boost to the self esteem ( at least for me ) to be able to achieve a great looking solder line.

(Yay! So smooth!)

But...

On the OTHER hand: Sometimes the solder just does NOT want to cooperate. It could be iron temperature, or room temperature. It could be not enough flux, or too little flux, or contaminated flux. It could also be operator error. No matter the reason it is the most frustrating thing EVER! You finish up a project and notice that there's a couple little spots that are lumpy. Or that there's a flat spot on this one line over here.. No big deal! Just go over it with the iron real quick, right? Riiiight??

Sometimes yes! Sometimes no.

Sometimes it turns out perfect.

SOMEtimes it makes it worse. Sometimes you hit that one spot with high hopes only to be disappointed when it causes three more "problems" in the same area. So you hit those ones with the iron, too. And it creates more "problems." And on and on it goes. Suddenly this thing that you thought was going to take five minutes has turned into hours. And you've got it looking pretty good... but... there's this one spot that could be better... ;-)