How to Solder Iron Tips for Circuit Bending

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: So now we need to connect the other end of this wire to this one common point that we've found just when we were exploring the circuit board. I want you to notice just for a second this soldering iron I have has a fairly fine point to it. There's all kind of different size points and diameter points that you can get in soldering irons. What one like this with--I mean this is the finest point you could get, but it's kind of comes with a nice sharp point. What that will allow me to do is when I start soldering on the circuit board, to really keep my heat at one small little place to keep my soldering to right where I want it. And that's kind of an important point, I mean, because if you look at this circuit board, a lot of these points are very, very close to one another, and what that means is in order to sort of maintain their electrical conductive independence, that is to say, in order to keep them from being connected with one another, you can't just glob big drops of solder on to it, because then what you can do is inadvertently bridge two contacts that are really close to each other that you might not want to bridge and might have effects that you don't want. So, when you start soldering wires to the circuit board, you need really to be careful about just really making sure that you're only working on the one little point that you're interested in. it's not a big deal if you mess up, because remember you can clean it up using the solder wick that we showed you last time. Let me see where is it, my solder wick? I think I have it here. It's a--here we go, yup, solder wick, remember if you mess up, you can clean up using solder wick. They actually make little vacuums that you can suck solder up with, but it's better to really have a soldering iron with a really fine point, and when you're working on a point in a circuit board, just be really kind of careful that's the only point that the new wire you're installing is going to touch and that if you put your solder there then it's not this big sloppy blob that's going to kind of flow over and touch any of the other points."