Øyvind Nydal Dahl

Are you doing this?

Don’t worry, I’ve done all of these mistakes myself.

And sometimes it works.

But by learning the correct soldering technique, you reduce the chances of mistakes in your circuit caused by a bad solder joint.

1. Removing iron before applying solder

When I teach someone how to solder, I usually say that you should first heat the pin and the pad, then apply the solder.

But sometimes my explanation isn’t clear enough. I’ve seen students heating the pad and the pin, then removing the soldering iron before trying to apply the solder.

The right soldering temperature is something many don’t really think about.

But, have you ever used one of those soldering irons with a variable temperature setting?

If you have, you might be wondering the same thing as Jyri. Jyri wrote to me in an email about soldering and asked: “I always wondered – what is the right soldering temperature in various situations?”

«It went through the circuit board, like a knife through warm butter.»

This could have been the intro to an incredibly capturing novel about through-hole components. But it’s not. I don’t think anyone has made a novel about such a narrow topic.

Oh, wait! I had to do an Amazon search after writing that. Turns out this one is something close. But something tells me it won’t start like my example-intro.

SMD components are small and kind of scary if you have never used them before. And the first time you want to solder one – you will probably start to doubt if you’re actually able to do it.

Even though I have soldered many SMD components, I still get that “Oh man, that component looks tiny!”-feeling. But usually, it works out fine. As long as it’s not too small.

SMD is short for surface-mount device. I always get a bit confused about the terminology, but I think SMD describes a printed circuit board, with components that are mounted on the surface of the board. So an SMD component is actually a surface-mount device component.