How To Use A Soldering Iron For The First Time

Learn the basics and soldering tips for beginners to help with projects around the farm. Get prepared to learn how to use a soldering iron for the first time and get started in the craft of welding.

By Andrew Pearce
Updated on March 22, 2023
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by AdobeStock/Dmitriy

Learn the basics and soldering tips for beginners to help with projects around the farm. Get prepared to learn how to use a soldering iron for the first time and get started in the craft of welding. Excerpt from Farm and Workshop Welding (Fox Chapel Publishing, 2012). 

Soldering is a lower-temperature version of bronze brazing, using filler alloys that are less physically strong and melt at lower temperatures. As with bronze work, the bond between metals is not made by fusion. Instead it’s formed partly by the filler hooking into the tiny hills and valleys of the joint metal surfaces, but mainly from the solder dissolving (not melting) into a very shallow surface layer of the joint. So for soldering to work, it must have free access to ultra-clean parent metals. For this reason flux is always used as a chemical backup to mechanical surface cleaning.

Silver soldering suits dissimilar metals and is generally used with capillary joints, leaving little or no external build-up of filler. The filler itself is a fairly expensive mix of copper, zinc and silver which, being tougher than soft solder yet still electrically conductive, is useful where a joint must stand moderate heat and vibration. Electrical heating elements are often silver-soldered. The temperatures needed for silver soldering can only be achieved by a flame (or arc), not an iron. If the work is not too big it can be laid on a firebrick hearth and heated with a small butane torch.

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