How to Tin the Wire for Soldering & Circuit Bending

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: Another thing that you should do with each of your wires before you connect them to something is to tin the tips of the wires. And what that means is you want to put--apply a very thin layer of solder to the copper that's on the wires. So we can do that here. Over here, I do have a hot soldering iron so we'll take it over and going to be very, very careful. First thing you want to do is clean the tip. There's a kind of a wet sponge down here. You're going to hear a kind of sizzling as I do this because--yeah, I'll move this out of the way so you can see. All right, so hot sponge down here. You're cleaning the tip. You're cleaning soot and like old solder off the tip here. Okay. So now our tip's nice and clean. We're going to bring it over here. And, actually, in this case, what we can do, I've got my solder here, I'll pick up a little bit of solder around at the tip. See how it just melts it right away. And then what I'm going to is I'm just kinda brush it on the end of this wire and as I'm doing that, the wire turns from--or the exposed part of the wire turns from being a coppery color to being the color of the solder. And that's because we are coating it with solder and that's called tinning the wire, T-I-N-N-I-N-G, and so that's kinda the first step to getting a wire ready to solder into place."