When I started soldering everything was big and had leads that went through holes in the board. You inserted the leads, bent them over to hold the component, flipped the board over, soldered everything, and trimmed off the excess leads.
Now I'm soldering things down to 0402 SMDs (1/4 the size of the smallest component in the picture) using a needle point soldering tip and a microscope.
A pair of 2N2222 transistors, one SOT23 and one TO-92.
I'm 57. The designer I do the soldering jobs for is in his early 80s. He can't do SMDs so I do all of that for him. He can still do THT components just fine but his designs have gotten more advanced and he just can't fit everything on the boards using THT.
Wow things really have shrunk. I want to get into electronics to make guitar effect pedals, eventually. This looks really hard, kudos to you for working with such small parts.
I took a quick look and there are some DIY guitar pedal kits for around $35 on Amazon. They're probably not the best quality but they're definitely a way to get your feet wet.
The small parts are a challenge but the key part if getting them positioned properly and tacked down. Once you've got a couple of opposite pins you can work on the others easily. For the tiniest of pieces like the tiny resistors the surface tension of the solder will stand them right up on end and pull them around which is very frustrating. I get those in place, hit them with liquid flux, then hold them down and touch one end. After that the other end is easy.
What's important here is that I'm using a standard soldering iron like anyone would use. It's a good one but it's just a soldering iron.
That's the whole joy of audio that supposed to mess with the signal - it doesn't need high fidelity, high quality, it just needs to do something 'interesting'. The main thing that stops me is a lack of space to set up a mini-workshop. Thanks for the good explanation, I would have never imagined components wanting to do that! The last time I messed with electronics probably was Radio Shack kids kits in the 1980s, the kind where the board had springs sticking out and held resistors and diodes to build AM radios and things with lamps & switches. It'd be good to get into it, but it all seems so hard, complex, and advanced now. I mean Auduino is kinda cool, but it's too much like my day job so I want to go all-analogue. It doesn't stop me wanting to buy an oscilloscope though, just to see what's going on! I think part of that is trust that I'm not going to melt my favourite guitar amp...
The SMD parts you've got there are still of the beefy and chunky variety. Have you had a look at some modern boards with microscopic capacitors and resistors nowaday? Have you had to "handle" a 01005 yet?
The smallest I have worked with are 0402s and I find them incredibly annoying. The smallest I go now is 0805. If I need smaller I'll just have the boards assembled by the fab house in China. I mostly use All PCB but my friends have tried PCB Way and another that I can't remember. They say that the boards are all basically the same.
Oh man, I remember doing that. We had rub on transfer traces and pads that we could apply to the board before etching that did a good job. I used to buy those at Radio Shack.
My friends, the ones I take in the microscopic soldering jobs for, have a small CNC mill that they can use to mill boards. That's very cool.
It is, though the process did start ages ago. The SNES from 1990 already had all the chips and most capacitors as SMDs, and the 1996 N64 motherboard is with the exception of the power LED entirely surface mount. I'd guess the reason for the recent disappearance of through hole devices is to with development of cheaper pick and place machines and labour cost increases - it's finally cheaper to get one of those to use with SMD components than it is to hire a warehouse full of labour to hand assemble your cheap thing from THD parts.
Also 0402 is an annoying SMD size code, as it's one of the two (other being 0603) that exist in both imperial and metric sizes - it can be 0402 metric, i.e 0.4mm x 0.2mm which is 01005 imperial, or 0402 imperial which is 1005 (1.0mm x 0.5mm) metric.
I've repaired several handheld devices from the era. The Atari Lynx had a bunch of SMDs. So does the NEC TurboExpress. I just sent out half a dozen NES which thankfully were mostly THT. I have a couple of SNES and a couple of N64s out there waiting for me.
Those boxes are the reason I upgraded from the Weller WESD-51 to the Hakko FM-302. I really need tweezers for SMD rework.
I just do minor soldering with building ham radio antennas and power connectors. For the most part it's easy stuff but every now and then I build a small, low power antenna matching unit and holy cow...
I've wanted to learn to solder for some time but it really does feel so precise and I have a bit of an issue with precision instruments for some reason (born that way no clue why).
Soldering is attainable for most people even with basic equipment. Most of us started with a basic consumer pencil iron. I still have the Weller WESD-51 that I used for more than 20 years sitting on my desk. My hope is that this group will provide support for beginners and allow more experienced hobbyists and professionals to talk about more advanced topics and techniques.
Maybe we need some short soldering 101 type videos?
Those things were awesome. My wife found one of Facebook Marketplace and sent me a link to the ad. I was like, "What they heck am I going to use that for?!?" She just laughed.
I end up needing a bunch of extras for 0102 components. If I don’t get contact with the solder blob before relaxing my grip on the tweezers, hot air blasts them away into oblivion.
That sucks. I've never gone that small. I ordered 0402s the first time I ordered SMDs. Now if I'm going to be soldering by hand I always order 0805s. Even those get flicked or blown away maddeningly often.
Welcome. It's more of a challenge than soldering THT, that's for sure, but it can be done even with basic equipment. I'm going to Walmart tomorrow to buy a $10 soldering iron and I'm going to remake the SMD soldering videos on my YouTube channel using that $10 iron to show that it can be done. No one should be afraid of soldering SMDs.
Tweezers tip irons and/or a hot air unit saves some of the headache. Now if only the ol' eye balls functioned like they used to back in the day... maybe the eyes where always bad and the writing on the through holes was just bigger haha!
Hehehe. I got a microscope a couple of years ago. It's an old, formerly very expensive optical binocular. An Olympus SZ40 that I bought for $200 from a microscope shop in Montreal. I can't live without it now.
The next thing on my list is a pair of tweezers for my Hakko. After that I'll start looking at hot air options.
Yup. The thing that's important to remember is that everything in my photos can be hand soldered with a bit of knowledge. I have always used a fairly basic soldering iron or station. My videos are intended to show that it is possible with basic equipment.
Ive been having my fair share of troubles woth 0402s at work after I ripped all of the smd test point pads off woth oscilloscope probes. I ended up with a ton of wires kapton taped to the board and poked into a 0402 joint, and miscellaneous circuits deadbugged and built up with point to point wires. My favorite was bending tbe legs on a sot-6 up to hold a resistor and cap, and the top half the the voltage divider was floating in the air over the board
It is harder for a beginner with a $10 soldering iron from the local hardware store than it was when I started 45 years ago. Most people don't start with hot plates or reflow ovens or hot air.
True. I mean you can still find most parts that you used 45 years ago, but making it small and using modern parts might require some new tools. You can get a tiny hot plate on Ali for cheap, but I'm not sure how good it is. There are people utilizing cheap irons as well.
You're saying that as if most beginners start with smt. Nowadays if you want to build your circuit you can have it made with the PCB already soldered at very affordable prices.