- Hey, it's Luke with Out of Darts.
Today I am going to teach you how to solder
and give you some of my top tips for soldering, specifically for the nerf hobby.
Let's get going!
Soldering can be one of those things that scare off a lot of newcomers to the hobby.
I've personally soldered hundreds of blasters and probably thousands of solder joints,
but I know that a lot of customers really struggle with soldering when they first get started.
Just a heads up, this video won't be the shortest soldering tutorial out there,
but it is specifically aimed at the nerf modding community.
First, to start things off, soldering is just
combining two metal components or contacts with metal solder.
The metal solder melts at a high temperature, and it allows you to join the metal together.
Also, soldering is not technically welding.
Welding melts the two metals that you're actually combining,
while solder only melts the joining metal, aka solder.
Most solder contains a couple of components,
but the key ones are the actual metal itself, the solder, and then the flux.
Most common is a rosin core flux, which is the center of the solder itself.
When heated up, the flux helps move the solder and let it flow between your two parts.
This could be anything from a simple piece of wire to a motor,
a switch, a PCB (or printed circuit board), or even a driver board like this brushless ESC.
For some, soldering comes pretty naturally, but I promise you it's
mostly about practice and patience and a few solid best practices along the way.
Here at out of darts, we get a lot of emails, and we do a lot of technical support.
Here are a bunch of examples of soldering issues that have been sent to us by customers.
And here, you'll see the use of too much solder or
a cold soldering iron or just a bad joint in general.
Or perhaps their tip wasn't very good -- oh hey, wait, that's mine!
So, at first glance, this soldering might not look terrible, but
there's definitely a little more solder here than necessary.
When you look really closely, you can see that the solder is actually touching
the side of the motor housing there.
This one was causing some extra sparks and wasn't one of my cleaner jobs for sure.
So, before we really dive in on soldering, I want to make a couple of notes about safety:
If you're working with a battery or a circuit, never solder to a live circuit.
And what I mean by that is don't solder to a blaster that already has a battery plugged in.
Always unplug your battery.
Always wear safety glasses.
I have watched videos online that say, “if you're good at soldering,
you don't need safety glasses; that is a lie.
Wear safety glasses.
The rosin core and other additives on these solders can sputter and splatter
and hit you in the face, and that is not a good thing.
Soldering irons are hot, and you can definitely burn yourself.
It's pretty common to get small burns here and there,
so don't be surprised if you occasionally lightly burn yourself.
Mind your soldering tip at all times.
You want to make sure that you're keeping this entire area clear of anything flammable.
It is a very good idea to have a cradle.
If one does not come with your soldering iron, I would highly recommend picking one up.
- Get off my back what is he the soldering iron police‽
- Always turn your soldering iron off when not in use,
even if it's only going to be 15 minutes or so.
Beyond just safety, it's also much better for your tips not to sit
out as they do oxidize when under heat and sitting exposed to oxygen.
Additionally, keep your soldering iron completely unplugged when not in use,
especially if you've got kids around.
When my daughter was two, she managed to turn mine on for me without me realizing it.
- It's off, that means I turn it on and just walk away!
- Next, I want to talk about ventilation.
It's important that you solder in a well-ventilated room
or outside or with a window open.
Alternatively, you can use carbon filter options with a fan.
This is about $40 on Amazon, and this sucks the fumes through an activated charcoal filter.
I 100% stand by using lead-free solder, and it's the only thing we sell on the site.
Yes, it is definitely more difficult to use, but it is far better for your health.
Lead is a known carcinogen and may increase your risk of cancer and other diseases.
Lastly, if you've seen any of my other videos, we’re pretty big on this:
If you're using a lipo battery or modding anything with a lipo battery,
lipo batteries can be dangerous.
Please read the links we have down in the description.
We've also got it right here.
Lipo batteries require specific care use charging maintenance, and storage.
This is not a complete guide right here to the safety of these, so you definitely need
to go read that article if you're going to use a lipo battery.
And it's important to always use a lipo alarm.
Doesn't really matter what kind. Just make sure you have one.
Before we get going on actually showing you how to solder, I want to make sure all of
the tools and supplies that are either required or some nice-to-haves as well.
First is your soldering iron.
There are many different styles and tip sizes and types and wattages, but the most important
things is to look for a tip that you can find readily available, whether that's on Amazon
or at your local shop because you will be going through tips as they are an expendable.
Next, you want to look at the wattage.
This is a pretty premium Weller soldering iron; this is one of their digital soldering irons.
So, you've got a digital display here; we're actually running at 700 degrees.
This also has a very convenient auto-off and a safety function, which is very nice.
Additionally, this is 70 watts, which is on the higher end.
You'll find a lot of the cheaper irons will be 20 to 30 watts.
This can power through more joints faster, and you will get everything done more quickly.
This is a more basic iron.
This is a 40-watt Weller, and this comes in two variations.
One version plugs directly into the wall while the other plugs into an adjustable temperature base.
This iron is just fine and works very well.
Our mod tech Greg uses this day in and day out for his builds here at the shop.
There are also some really fun mobile options we sell this one on the shop.
This is a very basic soldering iron, but you'll notice something different,
and that is that it does not have a plug.
So, this one will plug into a battery directly, a 3S or higher, and you can solder in the field.
These are rather inexpensive.
I wouldn't recommend them for home use because they do come with that lipo risk,
especially when you've got a hot tip near battery, but these are fantastic for when you want to do
game day repairs or in the field repairs, or just anytime you want to be mobile.
When you're soldering, you will need basic cutting and wire tools.
You'll need solder.
Again, I like to use lead-free rosin core solder.
This is a 1.5-millimeter diameter.
I like this size because it's very manageable,
and it's the right amount of flow for most nerf modding applications.
Tip tinner is really helpful if you're doing a lot
of soldering and you kind of want a shortcut to re-tin your iron.
You essentially plunge your hot iron in here, and it will clean the iron very efficiently.
It's worth noting that this does degrade your *tips faster, so keep that in mind.
You will also want either a sponge with some water or a brass sponge.
I find I end up using a combination of both, though you can choose whichever you prefer
and contribute to the raging debates online about which is best.
A desoldering pump is extremely handy for removing
large amounts of solder from a stock blaster, or from something you previously wired.
Similar, you can use solder braid, which is essentially finely braided copper wire.
You put this over the joints, you heat up the piece of copper,
and it kind of wicks and sucks up the excess solder.
Helping hands are always helpful.
These are probably my number one recommendation.
I get away without them in a lot of the tutorial videos and things by clipping wires and other
things, but these are the easiest way if you're working on more intricate stuff.
You can get helping hands with a magnifying glass.
Both of these are really inexpensive and are a must-have.
I would not, however, recommend this monstrosity.
I've paid $50 for this on Amazon, and when you set this to any two components, it is literally
just impossible to get these to stay where you want them.
They just always move no matter what.
I don't know what this is for.
Just don't use it.
When you're soldering, you're generally going to want to solder between 600 and 700 degrees.
I generally solder at around 700 degrees because I like to work with a little bit hotter of an iron,
especially if I’m working with a PCB or something that's got a little bit more of a thermal mass.
One mistake we see frequently is melting switches.
If you are melting switches -- that is, these terminals themselves are melting
into the components, you may actually have your soldering iron set too low.
What's happening is you're keeping your soldering iron on that switch for too long.
On the flip side, if your iron was at the correct temperature, the heat would never
get to travel far enough in there because your contact time with the switch would be very brief.
Now is the time to put those safety glasses on.
The first thing you're going to
going to want to do at the beginning of any session is to tin your tip.
And that's simply to apply some solder roll your tip around then
you can either brush that over a wet sponge or pass it over the brass wool.
You're not trying to really dig into the brass wool;
you just want to gently pull off the pieces of solder.
You are not trying to scrape it because that will wear down your tip faster.
You will want to re-tin this tip
every three to four solder joints depending on the speed you work.
Additionally, at the end of your soldering session, you're going to want to hit the
entire thing with solder, turn your soldering iron off, and you can leave it on there.
This will make sure that you've got a small amount of solder all over the tip around the tip,
and that creates a barrier for oxygen, so your tip doesn't wear out as fast.
If your tip does oxidize out, you can always apply more solder,
hit your sponge apply more solder again, and then hit the sponge again to remove it.
When your tip becomes too worn, or the tip becomes gouged out,
that's generally an indication of the tip needing to be replaced.
I find that a tip can last months and months of heavy soldering
as long as I’m good and careful not to leave it sitting out while on.
First, I’m just going to show you how to solder two pieces of wire together.
I'll use red and black just to make it obvious.
Of course, it's pretty rare that
you would actually solder red directly to black in a circuit.
Strip your wires just like normal.
I recommend stripping right before soldering
because this ensures that the wire itself hasn't oxidized.
Tin your tip, as we mentioned before, then you're going to heat up your joint.
Ideally, you're trying to heat up the joint itself.
Then let the solder flow into it rather than melting solder
onto the actual tip of the soldering iron.
Try to visualize how your tip is actually touching the iron. You want to have as
much of the tip touching the soldering joint as possible.
Here you can see that lining the iron flat has more contact than pointing the tip at the joint.
The faster you get at this, the easier it gets.
The key here is to use a small amount.
You're not trying to use this moment to get solder into your joint.
Doing so won't work well since the rosin core burns off too fast and
will be gone by the time you actually get the iron onto your soldering joint.
Now while this soldering joint is good for illustrative purposes because you can see
the solder connecting the two points, this is far from the best
option as far as how you should connect two wires.
In nerf, we generally don't connect two wires very frequently,
but I’m gonna show you two other methods that I think are really better than this.
Shout out to my mod tech Greg for making me add more to this video and making this video better.
So, this time we're going to take two wires like this.
Again, it's always a good idea to pop a piece of
heat shrink on there if you intend to heat shrink it.
Now, this is a quick and dirty splice, but you can essentially twist these two ends together,
and then you can clamp them together with one single clamp, and then we can simply solder.
This will produce a very strong joint because we essentially have the wires physically
twisted together and they are additionally soldered together so have a lot of contact.
The disadvantage to this splice is that you will end up with a wart in your wire.
Now that this is cooled, I can bend that joint over, and I can slide some heat shrink
over the top, and then I would just heat shrink that in place, and you'd be done.
Now there's another solder joint (and I believe this is called a lineman splice),
and this came from my mod tech Greg again.
We don't actually do very many joints with wire to wire; that's less common in in nerf,
but I’ll show you this one too because I think this is probably the best of all of them.
What we're going to do is we're basically going to fray these wires open, we're going
to push them together like this, and then we're going to twist and bring them all together.
Until we get them as clean as possible.
And so, you can see what's happened there is we've got interwoven
bands and you can kind of twist them opposite each other they'll get nice and tight.
They practically will hold themselves.
It's the same thing here: we're going to just solder just like we did on the last one
with this joint.
I chose to do a pretty long splice.
That gives us the maximum amount of overlap.
Just like that, we have an insanely strong splice.
Like any other, it's nice to get that heat shrink on there right as it's still hot.
You'll see the heat from the wires themselves have actually started to shrink that heat shrink.
There we've got a rock-solid joint that will stay reasonably flexible and not go anywhere.
Again, we don't do a lot of wire-to-wire splicing and nerf,
but it's a good place to start and practice, and get a feel for your soldering iron.
Pre-tinning your parts is also a great option.
Just apply a small amount of solder to each side of the joint,
then put the two parts together, and finalize the soldering joint.
Apply solder to the joint; allow it to flow over the joint.
Next, you want to remove the solder first and then carefully remove the iron.
You want as little movement as possible on the joint to
ensure that you've got a strong connection.
A joint that has moved during soldering can create
a cold solder which can have either poor connections or intermittent connections.
I like to solder with two hands:
My right hand is always holding the iron; my left hand is always holding the solder.
When I set the solder down, I always set it down to my left
so that I don't even have to look to find it because there's nothing
worse than being ready to do the joint and then looking around for solder.
I usually wait four to five seconds for the solder to cool; then, I check my joint.
I like to pull on wires to ensure the connection is solid.
You want to look for blobs, gaps, or excess solder; you only need a small amount of solder.
It's also important to check that the solder isn't bridging any other components.
On a motor installation, if the solder touches the motor housing,
this can cause a partial short or a complete short, which can burn out your motors.
If you do find yourself struggling, you can use these optional soldering pads that we do sell,
which act as a perfect spacer to keep the solder from touching the motor can or housing.
This allows you to just work quicker and solder faster with a little more confidence.
We like these so much we actually use them on every single blaster that's built in-house here.
Time to practice!
If you are new to this, I would highly recommend
you practice on small bits of wire for at least a few dozen joints.
After you've practiced, it will make your future soldering jobs much easier.
I've soldered literally thousands of components, and I’m still getting better and better over time.
Thank you so much for watching!
I hope this has been helpful.
I know this is a long one for a soldering tutorial,
but I really wanted to get as much in here as possible.
Do you have any other soldering tips that I missed? If so,
please put them down in the comments.
We will definitely pin the most helpful tip down below.
Until next time, I’m out of darts.