what solder should i get for my soldering iron?

[bob345]

another thing i want to ad is that you should be able to just hold your breath to avoid breathing in fumes directly. If the soldering takes longer than you can hold your breath, its likely your doing something wrong. It should take well under a second for any pcb joint, anything more and you risk damaging the part  you are soldering

[mariushm]

With most regular solder wires with rosin flux or rma (rosin mildly activated) fluxes, the flux smoke should be fairly mild and a simple 92-120mm case fan blowing air over the surface of the desk would be enough.

 

In theory, your iron temperature and solder thickness should be chosen in such a way that you won't subject the materials that need to be soldered for more than around 2 seconds

It's not a hard rule, it's just something that helps you reduce the risk of damaging pads, traces by overheating them.

 

As the guy that started the thread has a 45w iron, the problem is most likely that the iron tip doesn't have enough energy reserves and as soon as the tip is touching the metal (pads, circuit traces, leads) those metals suck the heat from the tip and reduce the tip temperature and the iron is just slow at raising the temperature back to where it's needed.

 

This video that I linked to in the first post I embedded above, explains it very well (please ignore the outdated look, the laws of physics haven't changed since then so information is still valid) :

 

 

[JoostinOnline]

29 minutes ago, bob345 said:

This is my preferred brand and gauge for pcb work. Works great for through hole and surface mount. Ive even soldered smd ic's with it with amazing results, but i would recommend using flux along with it in that application.

https://www.amazon.com/Kester-Rosin-Core-Solder-Spool/dp/B00068IJWC/ref=pd_sim_328_7?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B00068IJWC&pd_rd_r=H1D3YKY9VFKCWWHD2QQW&pd_rd_w=4IocD&pd_rd_wg=5TyLO&psc=1&refRID=H1D3YKY9VFKCWWHD2QQW

It already has flux in it, so unless you're super picky then it's not really necessary.

[bob345]

1 hour ago, JoostinOnline said:

It already has flux in it, so unless you're super picky then it's not really necessary.

In many cases when it comes to surface mount ic's, the flix in flux core solder is not quite enough, so using a bit of normal flux while soldering the very small legs on an ic helps quite a bit.