hey it's jen for tested here to share some tips with you about my soldering setup
so earlier this year and last year i got really into a project that required thousands of leds
literally thousands of leds needed to be soldered and i discovered some efficiencies
and some tools that i like and some tools that i didn't like so i wanted to share a little bit
about the uh the tools that i discovered and the processes that that worked for me and kind of
figuring out how to how to streamline that workflow and make it as efficient as possible
so the first thing i'll talk about is just the kind of setup of all of my uh my components so
i was putting together each of the leds with some lead wires and heat shrink i've got
resistors for all of them and what i found out works best is instead of taking each led
and attaching the resistor and attaching the heat shrink and attaching the wire if you do that times
a thousand it takes a really really long time so the best way to streamline that is actually to
assembly line each step of the process so i would take you know my spool my spool of heat shrink and
i'd cut you know okay i need a one inch piece of heat shrink and i'd cut 1100 pieces of that all
at once then i'd go through and i'd cut all of my lengths of wire and i would strip all of the ends
of the wires so i've got a huge huge bundle of all this these are all the same length strip all
of the ends and i've got that out of the way and i would go through the entire each of the components
in that manner so i've got kind of my my lunch tray here this is this is actually a lunch tray um
and i find these are really great for organizing the parts and keeping everything kind of in their
little sections and then once that's ready i just go through and grab one component at a time so i'd
grab my leds i've got some heat shrink to put on there i've got my resistor these ones actually
are pre-soldered with a resistor and then i move on to the actual assembly so i have a
couple of different setups here these are two versions of helping hands that i really like
this first one is a table clamp version so this one just has a piece that you can attach
it's adjustable for the thickness of your t your bench or your table and you just tighten that on
i really like these arms these are um sort of like the the lock line not quite lock line but the same
type of style um they're really rigid they're easy to position and you've got your little alligator
clips so you can set up your leds in there so i would just put my wires in like that and attach
everything like that this setup works great it's pretty flexible you can set it up wherever you
like but you do have to kind of be at the edge of your bench so i did find that occasionally some
solder was dripping down and actually falling into my lap which is not great um so this this works if
you um kind of want to have a position that you can work at that's kind of close to you and get
really kind of close down in there the other setup that i really like is this just simple weighted uh
helping hand set up it's got a little tray at the bottom if you wanted to put components in there
what i really like about this one is it's got the magnifying glass and it also has a light on the
top so if i plug this in i can light up my work uh my work area and i could also use magnifying
glass to see super fine details if i need to both of these have worked pretty well for me
um the other thing that i wanted to tell you about which i think is kind of kind of
cool this was a new discovery for me is this fume extractor so this is made by a company called kato
it is kind of a miniature version of one of those big industrial fume hoods i was looking at
those they cost like upwards of 500 and i wasn't looking to invest in something that big and bulky
for my space so i found this basically a miniature version so this has a adjustable fan on the front
which is pretty pretty quiet when you first turn it on but you can crank it all the way up
and it comes with it comes with your standard kind of charcoal filter that you would see in
a regular soldering feam extractor there's also a hepa filter upgrade that you can buy for it
so these little cartridges you can buy separately and they just install in the frontier of the unit
so this case opens up and you can just pull out so you can see starting to pull my pull my fumes
through there there's virtually no exhaust with this it's capturing almost everything in here so
it works really well and i'll show you exactly how this works so you get faster at this as you go
along uh the first you know 50 or so that you put together kind of plotting along but after a few
hundred few thousand you start to get really quick and you're flying through them i was also setting
a timer for myself so i'd say let's see if i can get five of these done in the next 10 minutes
and you get you get pretty efficient at it so i'll twist twist these together i've already got my
heat shrink on there don't forget that and then i just position these in the little clips here
and these are not the lock line arms but these are also super flexible but also rigid enough to hold
your work in position and i'll go ahead and turn on the fume extractor
what's good about this is you can position it exactly directly over your um your work
area so instead of having this panel at the back uh where you have to kind of make sure
that the fumes are getting in this can just go directly to your work area so get that going
so there you go um so again you get a lot faster at this um as you go along as you do a couple
hundred of them um i have found the assembly line process works the best for the the volume
that i'm doing if you're just doing a handful of leds you could probably do them one at a
time i do really like this hakko hakko soldering iron i borrowed this from tested this is kind of
this is the the one that's really familiar to a lot of people i know adam also likes a kind
of small battery powered one that works great and then we really like these brand of wire strippers
these are vice grips and i also like these are not a particular name brand but these work really well
for doing thicker wire i found that these ones actually work a little
bit better than the vice grips for doing large quantities of stuff because they are
i don't know they just they don't get caught as frequently as these so i kind of gravitate to the
to the black ones but if i'm doing thinner wire sometimes these are a little bit too too sharp and
they'll bite through the entire wire as opposed to just stripping off the casing so i kind of go betw
between these two um and then i've also got a pair of vice grip wire cutters for that as well so yeah
that's the basic setup we will put links to all of this stuff in the description if you want to
check out any of these tools for your soldering setup at home but hopefully this has given you
some ideas on how to uh make your process a little more efficient and yeah we'll see you next time