My first soldering!

[jackhammerJIM]

but not the one LIdl's sell.-pakside, they are crap.

Its funny you should say that Tel . i went into LIDL for a box of cereal and came out with a gas powered soldering iron . It soldered 3 terminals before the ignitor broke

 

[telectrix]

Its funny you should say that Tel . i went into LIDL for a box of cereal and came out with a gas powered soldering iron . It soldered 3 terminals before the ignitor broke

the aldi ones are good. the parkside one i bought was a soldering station with temp. control. the iron was used 4 times then stopped getting hot. replaced with a cheapo iron after cutting off plug and wiring into station. still working 3 years on.

 

[Elecmox]

For desoldering on PCBs applying some flux from a flux pen to the joints before desoldering will often help a lot. I've been using temperature controlled soldering stations for the last 17 or so years and wouldn't be without now. I do use a standard 80W iron for soldering larger wires such as shown in Luciens example above as they can dump a lot of heat into the joint so it can be soldered fast before all the insulation starts melting. A higher wattage iron is needed for most modern pcbs that have more than one track layer, some multilayer boards can have substantial amounts of copper in the inner layers for power rails that can sink the heat away. If the joint isn't heated up enough the plated through holes can be damaged when the component lead is pulled out.

My current iron for PCB work is a 130W JBC, a fantastic tool, bit rather expensive...

I used 60W for soldering wire to the needle of multimeter after it has broke. I managed to quickly solder wire before it could melt plastic insulator. If I used 30W it would probably need more time to solder and plastic would melt.