How to Solder a Capacitor to a Circuit Board

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Ken D. Orlich on behalf of Expert Village. Hi. In this segment we are going to put a component onto a circuit board. We removed this earlier, lets say we tested it. Everything was fine. So were going to put it back in again. Normally if it was a new component it would have much longer leads. The leads are pieces of metal sticking out of the ends of what ever component you have. Each of these things is a component. This is a component, and as a component goes it is called a capacitor. We are going to stick it right back in there. So, find the holes, flip it around, going to push it down here, get a grip on it. Now we need to bend the leads down. Pushing that down. We don't have a lot of meat on this one, but lets do what we can. There we go. If you can help it, something about soldering when you are installing components, is to get them as tight to the board as possible. The soldering will give it some strength of course, to hold it in there, but really the only purpose of solder is to make an electrical connection to the board. So you really don't want to use the solder as the strength of the connection. That's why you pull the leads through, you bend them down. Try to make it as tight as possible just by using the leads. So I'm fairly happy with how that's looking. Gets this guy going again. You have to turn it all the way up to get the butane going. There we go. Probably heard the difference there, really sounds like a flame thrower. Ok, to that's going. Now I'm going to get my 60/40 rosin core solder. Just take a piece off of there and we hold it down. Not quite hot enough yet, hang on a second or two. Hold that on the lead and the trace of the solder iron. Hold that on there again. There we go. See how it gets all nice and liquid. Filling the holes with it. There you go, and that's what you want, right there. Nice shinny smooth soldered surface. Lets just get this other one real quick. Doesn't take long at all or much solder. There you go. That's it. That's how you solder."