Soldering standards on YouTube

[tooki]

Try recording yourself soldering first. Then talk.
(so long as the soldering in discussion is being done on camera).

It’s hard, no question. But if you can’t do it well on camera, then don’t post it. A beginner won’t know that it’s a bad example.

[wraper]

Try recording yourself soldering first. Then talk.
(so long as the soldering in discussion is being done on camera).

One thing is when you embrace camera from both sides and solder in awkward pose. Another when you do ridiculous things which are wrong by their nature. And doing wrong is much more often than simply not getting it right on first try.

[@rt]

What I found (with a hand iron) is you don’t get the angles you want to hold the iron because the camera is in the way.
The video might not be about soldering. In my case, how to make a certain thing, so the soldering looked awkward.
But I wouldn’t say that was a lesson in soldering, but how to make the thing.

Try recording yourself soldering first. Then talk.
(so long as the soldering in discussion is being done on camera).

One thing is when you embrace camera from both sides and solder in awkward pose. Another when you do ridiculous things which are wrong by their nature. And doing wrong is much more often than simply not getting it right on first try.

[james_s]

The bizarre US pronunciation of soldering as soddering makes my brain hurt. I mean, that L is most definitely there...

You don’t hod something, you hold it. You didn’t sod something when you sold it. So why do you sodder with solder.

 

French must really give you a headache.

The L is clearly silent in the American English version of the word.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/solder

Language evolves, different regions have different dialects, doesn't make one superior to the other. Even different regions of the UK have strikingly different accents and pronounce words differently.

[GreyWoolfe]

Holy shitballs, batman, the sodder/solder debate still rages on here like code/no code on the ham bands.   Why does someone always have to whack the hornet's nest.  Are they bored?  Really, everyone should just let it go.

As for the videos, the only videos I have watched are the Pace videos.  I learned proper soldering techniques in school where you lost points for bad soldering.  I will not bother to watch youtube videos on soldering.  They way I hear it, they are like a train wreak.  You are too horrified to turn away but you can't help but look.  Can't be bothered with fanbois on anything, they just raise the noise floor.

[Electro Detective]

If it stopped at 'sodder' it would be bearable,
but there are other variations too I hear creeping in, like Sata and Sardur (Lord Of The Universe? fast acting migraine killer?)   

Sorry gents, the sodder vs solder debates may rage on as they will with no truce in sight, but it does say SOLDER on the packaging not SODDER.
Soddering iron and soddering tips and techniques doesn't sound quite right either.

May I add further I don't care to be in that 99.999% club mentioned earlier,
I get along super with all brits, yanks and cauncks   
thank yoll very much.

[james_s]

I never knew there was any debate, it's a stupid thing to debate. If you pronounced every letter in every word in nearly any language you'd sound like an idiot. French in particular is chock full of silent letters and a good number of English words are of French origin. American English is different than British English, it just is. Proper pronunciation of many words differs, it's silly to whine about it. If you speak English with an American accent and you pronounce the L in "solder" you're saying it wrong, that's just a fact.

[Housedad]

I have found a truth in my life.  Not everyone can solder a electronic component. Or a copper pipe fitting, or some wires together, or weld with tig, mig, stick or even spot weld.

Some cannot do ANY of it no matter how hard they try or train.  Some can learn a lot of it.  Some can learn it all.

It is when the idiots try to say they can do something that is obviously bad, and they won't admit how bad, that scares everyone.

Just look at the welds on a typical utility or boat trailer sometime. If you know what you are looking at, sometime they can scare you stiff thinking this thing is on the road.  Especially if it was repaired sometime by 'It can't be that hard hold my beer" BillyBob welder.

[coppercone2]

The bad habit I see all the time is cleaning the tip before putting it back in the stand - old solder should be left on to prevent the tip oxidising.

are you sure the differential contraction of the solder bead on the soldering iron tip is not actually stripping the coating off by sheer force?

[EEVblog]

I had to LOL at the number of posts it took to get to pronunciation. A variation Godwins law 

FYI, from the blogger side of things, it's actually quite hard to capture your best soldering quality on camera. Buy yeah, no excuse for really poor stuff.

[coppercone2]

Holy shitballs, batman, the sodder/solder debate still rages on here like code/no code on the ham bands.   Why does someone always have to whack the hornet's nest.  Are they bored?  Really, everyone should just let it go.

As for the videos, the only videos I have watched are the Pace videos.  I learned proper soldering techniques in school where you lost points for bad soldering.  I will not bother to watch youtube videos on soldering.  They way I hear it, they are like a train wreak.  You are too horrified to turn away but you can't help but look.  Can't be bothered with fanbois on anything, they just raise the noise floor.

there are still things to be learned

[coppercone2]

I have found a truth in my life.  Not everyone can solder a electronic component. Or a copper pipe fitting, or some wires together, or weld with tig, mig, stick or even spot weld.

Some cannot do ANY of it no matter how hard they try or train.  Some can learn a lot of it.  Some can learn it all.

It is when the idiots try to say they can do something that is obviously bad, and they won't admit how bad, that scares everyone.

Just look at the welds on a typical utility or boat trailer sometime. If you know what you are looking at, sometime they can scare you stiff thinking this thing is on the road.  Especially if it was repaired sometime by 'It can't be that hard hold my beer" BillyBob welder.

ah my trip to europe. I see six men standing by a fence to weld some posts (repair)

Welding mask on floor, three men by a bottle of vodka , 2 very close to welder and welder looking at the bottle (not at his work) with welding mask on the ground and him kinda doing some kind of hypnotic poking of the fence with a mig. It looked like his wife made him finger her while he was trying to watch foot ball or something. It was literary the most horrible work performance I ever saw from a individual. 

they were working about 20 minutes to total darkness, basically in the dark as well. No paint or rust cleaned and they were still at the same bracket after I finished something like a 20 minute walk (should take 15 seconds). I almost thought it was one of those old neon signs with a cow boy lifting his hat in a infinite loop, but instead with men drinking and someone poking a bracket with a mig welder. Yes he was still sparking in the same place, illuminating the group with little bursts of light.

I thought perhaps the men are getting a tan or trying to fool a home owner across the street with welding light.

They did use lincoln electric though IIRC 

[james_s]

I have found a truth in my life.  Not everyone can solder a electronic component. Or a copper pipe fitting, or some wires together, or weld with tig, mig, stick or even spot weld.

Some cannot do ANY of it no matter how hard they try or train.  Some can learn a lot of it.  Some can learn it all.

It is when the idiots try to say they can do something that is obviously bad, and they won't admit how bad, that scares everyone.

Just look at the welds on a typical utility or boat trailer sometime. If you know what you are looking at, sometime they can scare you stiff thinking this thing is on the road.  Especially if it was repaired sometime by 'It can't be that hard hold my beer" BillyBob welder.

This is something I've really never understood either. I can solder very well, it's something I can rightfully claim to be an expert at. I started soldering when I was about 8 years old and it didn't take me too long to be able to do a passable job even with the crappy firestick I had at the time. I can MIG and TIG weld reasonably well, not expert by any means but I can stick something together that I'm not embarrassed to show off. Welding has taken a LOT more practice and I can't fault someone for not being able to weld well, there are a lot of variables and it takes a very steady hand. Soldering though, you touch the iron, wait a moment, feed in a bit of solder, wait a moment, lift the iron away and you're done. It seems like anyone who can hold their hands halfway steady should be able to get the hang of it within an hour or two.

[CJay]

No paint or rust cleaned and they were still at the same bracket after I finished something like a 20 minute walk (should take 15 seconds).

This is one of the advantages of MIG though, you can get a rough as guts but seviceable weld with minimal preparation of the surfaces, sure it's not great and cleaning the workpiece gives you far better results but MIG is agricultural engineering level, simple and serviceable.

[Electro Detective]

Since we have drifted slightly off topique...

I'm a noob at welding, got interested in it a few months ago after having some inverter and transformer welders and associated VERY suspect cabling    dumped on the bench (and floor) for repairs,
safety checks and performance testing, and had to get up to speed with the trade, techniques and consumables very quickly.

Big thanks to Youtubers WELD.com, weldingtipsandtricks.com, WeldTube, Eastwood, ChuckE2009 and many many others that know their stuff 

Whilst I am a very persistent 'hobby' welder now, there is no way I would attempt structural stuff like trailers, bridges, ship hulls, aircraft landing gear etc
till I'm actually good at it and able to test and verify my welds to spec 

I get shocked when I see DIY trailer welding that's been done by beer swilling neanderthals,
how do they get a roadworthy cert for such slag infested, porous, spray painted bird sh!t beads ?     

Welding 'properly' and signing off on it is a LOT more difficult to master than soldering at any level.
This is MY humble observation thus far YMMV...


TIG, Stick and MIG is a different ball game folks, soldering is childs play after having a fair go at welding.

BTW: There's is no simple  'oops' in welding, most stuffups mean burns, arc flash/flying particle eye injury, shop FIRES, breaker trips, magic smoke... 
and a lot of yakka to start over and re-work a bad welding bead/joint.

BIG RESPECT from me out to good welders !   


BTW: all the US based Youtubers I've had the good fortune to watch, from Canada through to the USA/Texas/Mexico pronounce it 'weLding' 

AFAICT they are fusing metals together, not getting married,

am I correct? 

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

[bd139]

I am 3 until I am angry at which point I turn into 1

[IanMacdonald]

Talking to an American some time back he said that their schools tried to standardize English pronunciation, and the general idea was that all letters should be sounded. Which is fine in principle until you encounter a word like 'buoy' which commonsense says is the same as 'boy' but which some Americans really struggle to turn into 'beuuiieuy' or something.    Recall seeing a Canadian lecturing in the USA do this once and then go back to a sensible pronunciation. 

Though it's certainly not just English that has pronunciation woes. How do you pronounce "L'Occitane" for example?   

Actually 'Lox-e-tan' which seems like nothing you'd find in French. But, this is Southern French, not Parisian.

[Zero999]

He's very talented. He should study languages.

His natural accent is interesting. He's clearly from an area with a high immigration as, although he's a native English speaker, there are hints of foreign accents in his normal speech.

[coppercone2]

Since we have drifted slightly off topique...

I'm a noob at welding, got interested in it a few months ago after having some inverter and transformer welders and associated VERY suspect cabling    dumped on the bench (and floor) for repairs,
safety checks and performance testing, and had to get up to speed with the trade, techniques and consumables very quickly.

Big thanks to Youtubers WELD.com, weldingtipsandtricks.com, WeldTube, Eastwood, ChuckE2009 and many many others that know their stuff 

Whilst I am a very persistent 'hobby' welder now, there is no way I would attempt structural stuff like trailers, bridges, ship hulls, aircraft landing gear etc
till I'm actually good at it and able to test and verify my welds to spec 

I get shocked when I see DIY trailer welding that's been done by beer swilling neanderthals,
how do they get a roadworthy cert for such slag infested, porous, spray painted bird sh!t beads ?     

Welding 'properly' and signing off on it is a LOT more difficult to master than soldering at any level.
This is MY humble observation thus far YMMV...


TIG, Stick and MIG is a different ball game folks, soldering is childs play after having a fair go at welding.

BTW: There's is no simple  'oops' in welding, most stuffups mean burns, arc flash/flying particle eye injury, shop FIRES, breaker trips, magic smoke... 
and a lot of yakka to start over and re-work a bad welding bead/joint.

BIG RESPECT from me out to good welders !   


BTW: all the US based Youtubers I've had the good fortune to watch, from Canada through to the USA/Texas/Mexico pronounce it 'weLding' 

AFAICT they are fusing metals together, not getting married,

am I correct? 

well to be fair I have seen complete garbage be pretty strong but what I recommend is getting a sledge hammer, making a weld on something you actually want to weld with sacrificial metal with all the same lever lengths of torque and giving it a test till you are winded.

I was kinda freaking out about my braze strengths but I decided the strength was reasonable for the loads I was expecting.  ChuckE has videos on how to do a test but its not the same as getting a few extra bars and making a duplicate partial piece of something like a welding table and giving it a one over with a heavy sledge hammer and being generally mean to it (throw it at some rocks, bash it on some trees) just be careful of springs and wear goggles and a helmet when you do it. I found it was pretty difficult to destroy and I had to be creative to actually break something structural.

Now the experts can get away with using less metal and making it lighter then someone that does not do it 100% right but they are plenty usable. But I also 100% recommend trashing something of similar quality to what you are making so you understand how it goes wrong and what it looks like and what it does... you will get a better idea doing demolition like this then any youtube video can show you.

It kinda puts it in prospective. For instance I was not sure what quality I was getting with an aluminum weld (I was making long brackets like an angle iron). It looked kinda bad (it was oxygen/hydrogen tanks not HHO and it looks kinda scuzzy) so what I decided to do is get a anvil, flatten it out with a hammer, then put it in a vise, bend it back into the correct shape but inverted (so the weld turned inside out) with a heavy hammer, then flatten it again, then bend it again.

Doing this made me realize the weld, while not pretty or ideal, can take a shit load of abuse (I managed to do it a few times until I was really tired and it was kinda fucked up and tearing in some places and I kinda thought that if it gets THIS bad I will probobly notice (it was still strong but looked like it came out of a meat grinder).

A few hours of metal torture will give you more confidence in the work but still follow good work practices related to hydrogen embrittlement etc. IMO structural stuff is actually easier to do then something like a pressure vessel. The idea of pipe welding just makes me paranoid. Pipe brazing with high silver seems OK so long you do all the prep work right because it kind of takes care of itself and you can check if it flowed.

. but something like tig welding stainless high pressure pipe would give me the heebie jeebies unless I had someone verify it with x-rays and shit.

Also what will make you feel better is wailing on the joint with a chizzle or some kind of puncturing high force tool (pick axe maybe, but keep in mind its not going to like it too much). You learn something physically destroying metal and 'breaking into things', not sure what it is but its something..

Spending a day doing this will quell some non sense that builds up in your head from reading too much about it.. my idea of what temper is was not very close to reality for instance, neither was fracture, as I proved to myself with a bit of labor.

[langwadt]

No paint or rust cleaned and they were still at the same bracket after I finished something like a 20 minute walk (should take 15 seconds).

This is one of the advantages of MIG though, you can get a rough as guts but seviceable weld with minimal preparation of the surfaces, sure it's not great and cleaning the workpiece gives you far better results but MIG is agricultural engineering level, simple and serviceable.

and when BillyBob welder fires up his underpowered Ebay special MIG he might think the result looks ok but it is barely held together

[james_s]

He's very talented. He should study languages.

His natural accent is interesting. He's clearly from an area with a high immigration as, although he's a native English speaker, there are hints of foreign accents in his normal speech.

He got some of them absolutely nailed. The American dialects sounded 100% authentic to me, the Russian and Indian accents sounded exactly like some people from those countries I work with. Overall surprisingly entertaining, I don't think I could emulate most of those accents if my life depended on it.

[Zbig]

Sod the soddering. Why do many people pronounce "idea" as "i-dear" or "i-dee-ar"? I heard Dave and Big Clive saying it like that. What's the "IDR" behind the "r" at the end? Not judging or criticizing - just genuinely interested.

[Electro Detective]

...well to be fair I have seen complete garbage be pretty strong
but what I recommend is getting a sledge hammer, making a weld on something you actually want to weld with sacrificial metal with all the same lever lengths of torque and giving it a test till you are winded...

Same deal here, but please allow me to share my humble story about weld integrity going south...

I've had the A frame of a professionally made box trailer snap at the body weld join, going over a slight road hump whilst going downhill in the main city at peak hour, quite the adventure! 
A scene Hollywood could use in the next Avengers or Justice League installment 

Safety chains won't bail you out of that worst case towing scenario, because they are joined to the A frame and tow vehicle, with the fully loaded runaway box about to partake in free flight...

Luckily the bottom welds (TOTAL RECALL CORRECTION: the bottom of the unwelded square tube) just barely held enough for me to drag the fully loaded trailer (upturned 75 degrees and scraping ground!) slowly down the hill to level ground and into a side street,
where I managed to level it up by jumping on the top front whilst jacking up the rear, empty the contents and jerry rig secure with rope,
well enough to get the sucker to a local trailer fabricator who pointed out the obvious weld error that should not have been done that way   

He re-welded it at the snapped join for aesthetics and welded on a matching extra tube bar under the A frame to the mid section of the box,
in a way that offered maximum support and no weld area to flex or snap,
and it looked cool and original once spray painted over, with that  'never happened' vibe   

Needless to say, any trailer or tow rig I get in the future, no matter how well built, will be getting that mod done to it,
and chains strung inside the tubing from mid box to mid A frame,
just in case too many zombies hop on top during the next Z apocalypse   
 
i.e. if a trailer snaps at the A frame it's SOL City, someone will be hurt, dead, bankrupt,
most likely all three !

That was a lucky day for me when I think back about how it could have been a lot worse, had I been driving uphill or going 100kph on a busy freeway.

fwiw: the trailer load was balanced perfectly with a slight bias toward the tow vehicle, but how can you forecast a disaster like that? 
on top of that the weakened weld points had a nice even coat of paint so even a concerned owner's regular inspection is a waste of time and investment in false security

So yeah, whether it's a good looking bead with obvious penetration burns, or stringed along bird droppings that have 'held solid for years',
all structural welds should be checked and rechecked for flaws and wear and tear stress.


Same deal with soldering, I've sorted out a lot of 'good looking' and 'shiny' joints that were actually dry, cracked, or just sitting pretty on an oily track and or component leg, on cheap and expensive gear
to know better and always assume nothing.

[coppercone2]

well a solder joint is hard to measure and stuff because its small. You can't set it up right easily (for instance look at braze joint strength vs spacing, it peaks around 0.004 inches filler gap.

What percent of nominal failure force at that application did the weld fail at? Like weld size in reference to its say, 75% of nominal for quality amateur work, derated of course, tensile strength. ?