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Diy pointed soldering tip

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meanie2:
Hi! Most of the soldering tip sold online isn't pointed enough, I need something more pointed than this for 40W:



Can I file it down? Anything I need to take note? Thanks in advance.

DTJ:
You can file it down but it may have a very limited life afterwards.

Tips are usually iron clad over copper. If you file it you will expose the copper which when hot will dissolved into the solder. If you run your iron hot it only takes  a few hours use  for the exposed copper to become a crater.

Maybe look for a suitably small tip that fits your iron. I find that long fine tips don't have the thermal inertia sometimes needed so I go for short stubby fine tips when needed.

Shock:
If the tip is a copper core you could shape your tip then use a DIY electroplating method to add a protective plating layer back to the tip. Iron might be tricky, so perhaps start with trying nickel.

I'd be careful to only grind/sand the very end of the tip, that way only the end needs submerging in your plating solution. You can find a lot about plating online, but a perfectly smooth clean finish seems to produce the best results. Practice on some scrap before you butcher a tip.

tooki:

--- Quote from: meanie2 on September 17, 2019, 01:08:50 pm ---Hi! Most of the soldering tip sold online isn't pointed enough, I need something more pointed than this for 40W:



Can I file it down? Anything I need to take note? Thanks in advance.

--- End quote ---
What do you think you need a needle-like tip for, anyway? It's a common misconception that soldering small contacts has to have a tiny tip. And the thermal mass of thin tips is terrible. Before I learned this, I got the 0.6mm chisel tip for my iron (it simply looks like a pin, you need a loupe to even see which sides are flattened to a chisel), and I can tell you, I never use it. Heat struggles to get to the very point, so when tinning, you end up with the solder forming a droplet above the very end, unless you turn the temperature up way hotter than you'd need otherwise. I'm sure there are special applications where a tiny tip like that is required, but it's definitely not for anywhere near as many situations as people think.

The tip I use a lot for fine soldering is actually a 2.3mm ⌀ drag soldering tip with the concave "well", which grabs onto excess solder, meaning beautiful, not overfilled joints, even on tiny SMD pads.

KL27x:

--- Quote --- Heat struggles to get to the very point, so when tinning, you end up with the solder forming a droplet above the very end, unless you turn the temperature up way hotter than you'd need otherwise
--- End quote ---
Oh, boy. Here we go, again. Man of science at work.:-DD

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