I noticed using a 25 watt iron while replacing my electronics on my strat that it was very difficult to get a proper hot joint. It took what I felt is an excessively long time to heat it enough to melt the solder, a couple minutes give or take. Is a 40 watt iron or gun a better way to go for guit...
Which solder is optimal for guitar wiring? I seem to have a spool of this lead-free rosin-core solder solder. It contains 97.3% tin, 0.7% copper, 2.0% rosin flux core. Would this work well for guitar wiring? In the past I've used Radioshack 60/40 rosin-core solder, but I've run out. Should I just...
1) when soldering to the pot shell, flatten the wire before you tin it. [a quick squeeze with a pair of pliers will do it]. 2) Where you have not folded back the lug, hook the wires and solder them to the jumper lead rather than the shell; or if the lug is folded, hook the wires and solder to the lug
It'd be nice, if you're swapping out pups just to see how they sound, to be able to do it without de-soldering and re-soldering several times. Is there any GOOD way to wire without soldering? If only temporarily?
This nonsense about soldering drives me fuckin' crazy - if you don't absolutely KNOW how to properly use a soldering iron - or if you don't know the difference between a soldering iron & a soldering gun - you can do more damage to your equipment than you think. Blown caps? Overheated POTS? Bad/cold solder joints? Tell me about it.
My soldering iron gets pretty hot, and I've noticed I've been having more trouble than I should wiring and getting things right. How easy is it to burn out a pot?
Before I go out and buy a soldering iron to do pickup and guitar wiring with, I want to make sure I'm headed in the right direction. As I understand it, the best all-around wattage for working on a guitar is 40 watts and the best brand of iron to get is a Weller. Am I correct?
I have some soldering practice from modding stompboxes, changing pickups, etc. But this stompbox I'm building has some transistors in it, and I've been told that the heat from the iron may damage the transistors, and I need to use a heat sink to avoid that. However, I don't really understand what heat sinks are, or how they work.
Soldering wires to speaker terminals is one of the easiest soldering jobs to do, but if you don't want to solder then get some crimp-on spade connectors and use them to connect the speaker.
A pen-type soldering iron takes a few minutes to warm up, but it stays hot as long as it's plugged in. A soldering "gun" has a special step down transformer that converts the AC mains power to low voltage but HIGH current to quickly heat up the heating element. So a gun is more convienent because the tip is ready to solder in seconds, BUT the gun is quite heavy. They are also a bit too big and ...
