I bought a kit and a cheap soldering iron from Maplin today. It’s taught me a lot about soldering…. And accident repair !
I got most of the way through the kit, then right at the end I made a mess of soldering a capacitor, accidently leaving the soldering iron on the capacitor legs for too long and it ended up melting away the 2 solder pads on the PCB. Aggggh!
Once the solder pads were gone there was no way of attaching the capacitor to the PCB. I thought I had ruined it, the kit cost me £’s and here on the Moray Firth coast, the nearest Maplin is an hours drive there and an hours drive back ! And the kit is of sentimental value as I planned to give it away as a gift to a close friend.
This caused me to do some research on the internet, that I wouldn’t have done otherwise. I managed to salvage the kit by
1) scraping away at the PCB with a prong of a fork to reveal the copper tracks,
2) I then tinned the copper tracks using a straightened paper clip heated up by the soldering iron (the paperclip being smaller than the tip of the iron),
3) then I bent the capacitor legs over the top of the tracks and soldered the capacitor legs on to the tracks. Well, you learn something new every day :-)
Hats off to the guy on this forum who used to design the kits. I wish I had the electronic know how. Maybe one day.
I'm still struggling with the soldering though. It goes everywhere apart from where I want it to. And I've had many burnt fingers. All part of the fun I suppose.