| Electronics > Beginners |
| Homebrew soldering iron. |
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| registereduser:
Is there a video, blogspam article, pdf ... something that shows how to make a soldering iron with a thick copper wire tip, that works? I watched several videos, and looked at similar articles using a wall wart and wrapping some resistance wire around a bit of copper wire with that fiberglass insulation or whatever it is. I tried it with scrounged bits from a heat gun that died. Not sure if the sleeve material is right, but it seemed to work,... ish, but not reliable. I hooked up to a wall wart, and tip got hot enough to melt solder. Once. Upon successive attempts it never reached temp, and the wall wart died eventually. Well, it started giving sporatic voltages. It was a 5v 2a unit. Now it is parts. I also tried it using a little clock radio transformer that has a 20v secondary. That has a center tap for two 10v, and another secondary 10v. I only tried the 20v. Very slow to heat up, and the transformer was getting hotter than I was comfortable with. Could I expect better results by simply getting a bigger transformer? I've made a alcohol burner powered iron that performs better than any of the three or four cheap irons I've ever owned, but fuel costs... I have a couple more wall warts, and an atx psu, but I'd rather not just keep killing wall warts. I tried hooking into the 12v on the atx psu, and it just instantly shuts of from overload. Please refrain from the danger warnings and just go buy another POS advice, I've heard that already. I'm asking for help on how to build a soldering iron, not how to buy one. I'm aware that heat burn skin. Thanks. I should add that the application will be for raping old tvs and such, then building smoke emitters. For clarity here's a pic of the type I've been trying, resistance wire wrapped around copper tip. |
| Ian.M:
For a directly heated copper bit 'gun' style soldering iron, you need a lot of current at a very low voltage. No wallwart will be suitable, and a PC PSU is likely to be too high voltage, even on its 3.3V rail. OTOH if you get a low voltage battery powered iron that has a proper resistance element either separate from or integral with its bit, and you feed it the same voltage as the batteries supply with adequate current capability, it should work. If you make a single turn winding using *HEAVY* cable through a beefy enough torodial transformer or round the center core leg of a repurposed MOT with its HV secondary removed, and use a heat resistant terminal block to connect it to a hairpin shaped copper wire bit that is a small fraction of the CSA of the heavy cable, that should also work, if you nip the wire at the bend to create a higher resistance hotspot. Control it by switching the power to the transformer primary. If you are going to be using it much, make a jig to mass produce the copper wire bits on, as without plating to prevent the solder dissolving them, they don't last long. If you are doing assembly work, you'll need a new bit every few hours! |
| helius:
The Weller soldering gun is a copper wire directly connected to a transformer secondary. The transformer ratio is much higher than you used, however, with 120V input and only 250mV output. The current through the tip is somewhere between 600 and 1800 amps. No, you cannot use a 5V 2A wall wart to do this. |
| Cliff Matthews:
Useful durable tips should not be pure copper, they need to be coated with what solder can 'wet' (like iron plating). Further, having a temperature controlling thermal-couple/heater combo close to the tip is important for performance, not just in controlling it, but stopping damage to delicate electronic components. If you truly don't care about wasting time on something so fruitless, disregard this and continue, but cheap durable tips that last for decades exist.. it is from these platforms you may want to start your DIY effort. Why not buy a good tip for $12 as a starting point (it's ~4.2 ohms) and you can control it by a 555 PWM'ing a MOSFET. The same can done with cheap Chinese T-12 tips, but whole thing's a $$ waist since the market has been feeding on fierce competition and slim margin's for some time. |
| fsr:
I have a goot branded 30w soldering iron here that i'm using since the time the dinosaurs walked the earth. Ceramic tip. That's for general electronics. If you need to solder something heavier, you will need more power. But too big a soldering iron could fry smaller components quite fast. |
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