Technical Articles

Maintaining your Soldering Iron: Best Practices

by David K. on March 19, 2012

While tip tinning and tip cleaning are both very important to keeping your soldering tips in their best shape, there are a few general “best practices” that can help contribute to the life of your tips and of your iron.

Use the Lowest Possible Temperature Setting when Soldering

This tip is especially relevant if you have a soldering iron with temperature control. When you can, it is best to use the lowest needed temperature as it slows down the rate of oxidation, reduces the thermal shock when wiping the tip on a damp sponge, and can help prevent heat damage to the components you are soldering.

Using low temperature settings on your soldering iron can also preserve the iron itself. Near the tip of most soldering irons is a heating element and as it heats up and cools down it will expand and contract. If it changes size drastically many times there is a possibility that the sleeve around the heating element could become stuck and either be too large or too small for its tips.

Use Distilled Water on Cleaning Sponges

While not entirely necessary, if you have the choice you should use distilled water on cleaning sponges. Whenever you touch a hot iron to a wet sponge some of the water will evaporate. If you are using non-distilled water then all of the minerals and contaminants in the water will be left behind, making your sponge dirty. Dirty sponges must be replaced more often as the contaminants could hurt your soldering tip.

Use the Correct Solder for your Job

Whenever you are starting a new project double check your components and solder wire and make sure they are compatible. If you use incompatible solder then you may need to overheat your iron and parts to get the job done, which can damage both. When in doubt, contact the manufacturer of the parts and solder to find out if they will work well together.

That is all for our series on maintaining your soldering irons. Have any more questions? Leave a comment below!

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Maintaining your Soldering Iron: Tip Cleaning

by David K. on March 5, 2012

Last week we looked into why tinning your soldering tips is important to improve their life span, but that is not the only thing to keep in mind when maintaining your soldering iron. To ensure your tips are free of any oxides, you should clean them regularly. By cleaning your tips, you remove any dirt or dust that has accumulated as well as built up oxides. While you should clean your tips every time you are done using them, you should also pay particular attention to blackened tips. If your tip is turning black then that is a sign of oxidation, and you should clean your tip right away to prevent corrosion. Always make sure to re-tin your tip directly after cleaning it to help prevent oxidation.

tip clean sponge Tip cleaning sponges are one of the most common cleaning methods. While you are soldering, you can wipe the tip across a sponge to wipe off any excess solder, dirt, or oxides. However, you must be careful to always use a clean sponge. If there is dust or contaminants on the sponge, you will hurt your tip more than you will help.

When cleaning your soldering tip with a sponge, there is the concern of shocking the tip. Because the sponge is much cooler than the soldering tip, it can cause the temperature of the tip to change rapidly when they touch. This can cause the tip to contract, and can quickly wear out the tip if done too often. To minimize this shock, try wire cleaning pads, which are sturdy enough to wipe off contaminants but soft enough that they will not scratch the surface of the tip.

Another way to clean your soldering tips is to use a combination tip cleaner and tinner. Tip cleaners/tinners are chemical pastes that typically come in metal tins. When you use these items, you heat up your iron and then wipe your tip in the paste. This helps to remove oxides from the tip because cleaning the tip thoroughly when normal cleaning will not help. These tip cleaners and tinners can also be used with tip polishers to maximize their cleaning.

Do you have any more questions about cleaning your soldering tips? Leave a comment below! Also, come back next week for another article on maintaining your soldering irons.

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Getting Rid of Charges Part 4: Grounding the Charge

by David K. on February 20, 2012

While it is important to know how to keep yourself and your workstation grounded, it can be interesting to understand where your charge goes. Most ESD-safe products seem to whisk your charges away to a nebulous “ground”, but it is not always clear what that means. Typically grounding hardware connects to the earth, using its large neutral charge to negate any built up static on objects.

While talking about ionizers last week, we noted that opposite charges attract. This is what allows the ions to neutralize charges as they fall across a workbench. There is also a corollary rule: similar charges repel. If you have a build up on charges on objects (say too many electrons producing a negative charge) they naturally want to move away from each other. The problem is that they often have no place to go, until they come in contact with another device.

By grounding yourself to the earth, you give the electrons a path to leave safely. Because the earth is so large, you will discharge fully whenever you are properly grounded to it. If you try to discharge to a small object then you may get rid of some of your charge, but probably not all of it, leaving both you and the object with enough of a charge to damage ESD sensitive devices. The earth, however, can easily support any charge that a device or human in a work area can normally generate, so it serves as a practically infinite container for any extra charge you may gain.

What makes the earth such a good ground? At first it may seem odd that the earth is used to neutralize charges in this way, especially as dry soil can be a very good insulator. The main reason it works so well is the moisture in the ground. Just as lightning can hit trees and travel to the ground through the rain on them (as wood is another great insulator), the moisture in the ground can serve as a great conductor for errant static electricity.

It is important to measure the soil resistivity wherever you are placing your ground, as you want it to be as low as possible. The lower the soil resistivity, the better your grounding system will work. Most times when you are grounding in a building you can use metal beams that are part of the framework, as long as they are driven into the earth and are suitably set up for this use. This can be a great method as these beams tend to be driven very deep in the earth, and the deeper they are set, the lower their resistance. If you do not have access to this framework, you can also connect to a metal rod set into the ground. With this method you need to test various areas to make sure you place the rod in the place with the least resistance, ensuring that the charge can easily make its way into the ground.

That ends our series on grounding. Make sure to check in next Monday for a new series of articles!

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What is Color Temperature?

by David K. on February 15, 2012

In recent years, ergonomics in the workplace has become a large deal as people try to keep themselves as comfortable and productive as possible. One important factor is the color temperature of the light around your workspace. Having the correct color temperature for your task lighting helps reduce eye strain as well as ensure that you see colors properly.

How do we measure color temperature?

Color temperature is intricately related to the concept of black body radiation. An ideal black body is an object that absorbs and radiates all wavelengths of light. This means that it perfectly absorbs all energy given to it, and it perfectly emits the energy it contains. When a black body is heated, it gives off light and when the temperature of the black body and the color of the light source are identical, you get color temperature.

Because color temperature is related to the temperature of a black body, it is measured in kelvins. The Kelvin scale is similar to Celsius, but with 0 situated at the absolute coldest temperature possible, rather than at the freezing point.

Black bodies are theoretical, but there are a few items that closely approximate their characteristics. One in particular is the filament in a tungsten light bulb. Typically the color temperature and the actual temperature of the filament are the same.

However, not all light sources are even close to perfect absorbers or emitters. Some light sources only emit certain wavelengths of light, or they emit some wavelengths more than others. For these the normal color temperature does not work well, as it assumes that all wavelengths are equal. Correlated color temperature is used in these instances by averaging the wavelengths and trying to match it as closely as possible to an incandescent light source. Then you can use the temperature of the incandescent light to find the color temperature.

What are the temperatures of common light sources?

The typical range of color temperature spans from 1,000 kelvins to 10,000 kelvins. At the bottom end of the spectrum is candlelight and other deep red lights. On the other end are blue lights, such as clear skies on bright summer days.

The general colors for these light ranges have an effect on what you can easily see in those lights. For red lights in the 1,000 range, it is much easier to see red colors, making it hard to tell the difference between blues and blacks. Of course many of you may have already noticed that if you are putting on socks and shoes with dim incandescent lights it can be nearly impossible to tell black socks from blue. On the other hand, if you have a very high light color temperature then reds and oranges start to look the same.

When looking for light for a home or work area, you need to find the best temperature to correctly see colors and reduce eye strain. It is typically recommended to have white lights similar to daylight, around the 6,000-6,500 kelvin range. This is a good middle of the road option, especially useful for jobs where you need to accurately see color for design purposes.

For more information on color temperature, you can check out the Daylight Company’s information section. Konica Minolta also has rather extensive resources on both color and light, including color temperature. Make sure to check out the task lights and replacement bulbs available on All-Spec Industries’ main site for your workplace lighting needs.

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Getting Rid of Charges Part 3: Workstation Grounding

by David K. on February 13, 2012

While personal grounding equipment is important, people are not the only hazard to electronic devices. Any ESD-sensitive device can also be damaged from charges built up while moving it across a work area or from other charged items in the area. To reduce and counteract the build-up of static charges, ESD-safe matting and ionizers are used in areas where electro-static discharge is a concern.

ESD-Safe Matting

ESD-safe mats are integral parts of static safe work areas. These mats discharge any introduced charges through a connected wire and ultimately transfer them to either an electrical or earth grounding point. Connecting to an electrical ground, which is either the screw through the metal plate covering an outlet or a screw on the outlet casing inside the wall is fairly simple while finding and attaching the wire to an earth ground (which is generally a metal rod hammered into the ground before the foundation is poured) is substantially harder. It is important to use a ground tester to make sure that the outlet you are using for your electrical ground is connected properly and safely to an earth ground. A faulty ground could result in damage to ESD-sensitive devices or personal harm if the ground is connected to a live wire.

Matting for ESD-safe work areas are normally dissipative or will have a dissipative top layer. Compared to a conductive surface, a dissipative top layer slows down how fast a static charge drains while still providing a path to ground for any built up charges. By draining the charge more slowly; the dissipative surface provides less risk to the static sensitive devices.

Ionizers

Bench top ionizers and overhead ionizers are used to neutralize insulators and any other devices that are not fully grounded or can’t be grounded. Most ionizers work by using a fan to spread positive and negative ions across an area. These ions are naturally attracted to their opposite charges, so positive ions neutralized negative areas and negative ions neutralize positive areas. Any left over ions will neutralize themselves as they find their opposite charges. This allows for an area of neutral charge by slowly and safely neutralizing charged objects in a work area.

Next week will be our last in this series on grounding, where we will explain how grounding works at the level of the earth. Come back next week for more information and be sure to read our previous articles on grounding below!

Getting Rid of Charges Part 1

Getting Rid of Charges Part 2

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