What temperatures for solder irons?

[Northern Lights]

What temperature is good for general duty repair and wire terminal soldering?

I used to solder small boards with a 50 watt running full power and was satisfied even with boards. Now I have almost twice the watts to work with and I am curious. I could take the temperature of the 30 watt and extrapolate some but I bet someone can give me a good answer and I can set my temperatures by the thermometer now.
I never knew what temperature my irons were at because I used the power control to get to where the solder flowed and the boards did not burn or bake by trial and error. Now I am using my thermistors and can take temperatures of the irons and I have way more heat then I need available.
I have or had rather, a soldering station with a power control and a 50 watt iron. Tne iron burned out.
The temp control is not a reostat, possibly it is an FET the way it looks, is that possible? I have no idea but it works with various irons.
Anyway, I bought a $2, $6 shipping, 80 watt iron. I have several 30 watt irons and large broad tip giants not to mention guns. But...
I put a 3-prong plug onto the iron cord and just plugged in my existing irons into the power control. The 80 Watt runs 420 to 980 degress F under the power control, if I need a finer point I can use the the 30's.
I think this cheap 80 will do every thing I need. It's tips are changeable too and I have spares.

 

[PEU]

depending on the work I do I set the temperature in my soldering station around 300C but if Im soldering big pieces I go all the way to the max 450C+

60/40 soldering wire needs around 220C to melt.

An interesting fact I learned many years ago is: if you can find 63/37 and 60/40, go with 63/37 because this solder is "eutectic" meaning it goes from liquid to solid with no inbetweens, no plastic state, in common words this means no cold solder joints.


Pablo

 

[Northern Lights]

depending on the work I do I set the temperature in my soldering station around 300C but if Im soldering big pieces I go all the way to the max 450C+

60/40 soldering wire needs around 220C to melt.

An interesting fact I learned many years ago is: if you can find 63/37 and 60/40, go with 63/37 because this solder is "eutectic" meaning it goes from liquid to solid with no inbetweens, no plastic state, in common words this means no cold solder joints.
Pablo

That is a great tip! Thank you!!:twothumbs

links for conversions:
I have this in my LINKS tool bar:
http://www.convert-me.com/en/
another
http://www.google.com/Top/Science/Reference/Units_of_Measurement/

 

[JCup]

Temperature controlled soldering stations are typically set for tip temperaturs of 600 to 700 F.

Tin lead 60/40 or 63/37 melts about 360 F. Even the lead free will work fine at those settings.

The wattage of the iron will determine the eventual temperature and the heat transfer rate, and the bulk of the heated tip has a big effect. Be careful with a big 80 Watt unregulated, you can burn laminate on a board easily, or lift pads.

If you are soldering boards you care much about, get a temp controlled soldering station. Look for a Hakko - easily found online. You want a good Wattage like 75 or so, with a regulated temperature control.

 

[tino_ale]

An interesting fact I learned many years ago is: if you can find 63/37 and 60/40, go with 63/37 because this solder is "eutectic" meaning it goes from liquid to solid with no inbetweens, no plastic state, in common words this means no cold solder joints.


Pablo

YES :thumbsup:
I have run high temp tests in the past on electronics that we wanted to operate at 225°C or more. At this temperature, solder becomes a real issue as the slightest contamination in the hight temp solder would make the joints melt during operation :green:

 

[tino_ale]

As for the OP question, if your need is general electronics repair and wire terminal soldering, you would have been better served by a good $30-$40 35W general purpose iron than a $2 80W one.

As long as the parts you are soldering do not have a large thermal capacity there is no point using such a high wattage iron.

 

[Northern Lights]

As for the OP question, if your need is general electronics repair and wire terminal soldering, you would have been better served by a good $30-$40 35W general purpose iron than a $2 80W one.

As long as the parts you are soldering do not have a large thermal capacity there is no point using such a high wattage iron.

That does not make sense because as pointed out I have a few irons and guns of various wattage and an adjustable power source that the original 50 watt that was on. The 50 burned out. I can select any output I want but have never worked with actual temperatures. The 80 is capable of temperatures 420-900+. All the irons can be plugged into the power source and made variable and their physical size is comparable. The 80 covers the spectrum to include the max outputs of a 35 W iron and will not surpass any setting it is set too so at some point it will do exactly the same job as the 35 but can also be reduced or increased, hence the choice of the 80 to put on a variable power source does serve well. The 80 does it all from a single source.

My point is I never have worked with given temperatures, never put and iron on a thermistor. I just worked with settings that by long experience I new to be correct but I have no cross reference to what the actual temperatures are achieved. I can now measure temperatures and calibrate my system. Most of the time with few exceptions I ran the 50 on high and never used the advantage of the variable power, likely because the 50 was too cold when run under max. Now I have a solution to that but do not need the full power of the 80 most of the time.

I just do not know what temperatures serve the different applications, I guess I could experiment. But I got great answers that will allow me to set this up quickly.

Thanks you all for the input.

 

[JCup]

Without getting into thermodynamics, a big wedge of copper (clad with iron, then tinned) at 370 C will be enough of a thermal mass to take a tiny 0402 or smaller component all the way to that temperature in milliseconds. This thermal shock will crack multilayer ceramic capacitors and other small SMD parts.

And you need to limit time in soldering. Work fast.

Set your temp, but consider the thermal mass of your iron vs. the component you are heating.

In production manual soldering, you have to consider the size and shape of the tip along with the temp.

You are on the right track.

 

[Northern Lights]

The 80 is like the 30, typical iron but I haved a handfull of different tips I have accumulated that can be inserted for specific problems too.
I also have an antique gasoline blow torch and solid copper irons, used in plumbing applicartions, that are from circa 1930-1945! Bet those carry some thermal energy.

 

[GarageBoy]

I'm using a Weller WTCP with 800 degree tips (it's magnetic controlled and temp is tip dependent)

 

[dat2zip]

A soldering iron sitting in the holder requires little power to keep it at temperature.

It probably takes less than 5W to keep a small tip at temperature. Most soldering iron apply heat and then coast until the tip drops a few degress. This means most of the time power is not being applied to the heating element in the tip. The old magnetic wellers had a audible click when power was applied to the tip. The magnetic tips would lose magnetism at a specific temperature like 700F and when the tip temperature would drop a few degrees the magnetic properties would pull the heating element to the tip due to magnetism and this would snap the heater forward making an audible click sound. Sitting idle they would click every minute or couple of minutes.

Touching the tip to solder something will cool the tip down. That's when the soldering iron applies power to try to regulate the tip and keep it at temperature. Soldering small SMT components is fine with a 30W type soldering iron. When the item to be soldered has less mass than the tip it doesn't require a lot of power to keep the tip at temperature.

If the soldering tip has to solder something like components on a PCB that are connected to large areas of copper the large copper area on the board will sink the tip as the thermal mass of the copper board + components will suck the heat away. In this case along with other similar situations it requires a lot more power to keep the tip at temperature. Under these conditions you'll need a 80W or higher power rating to keep the tip at temperature. Consider the worst case. Sticking the tip in a cup of water. This will cool the tip down and you will be forcing the soldering station to apply constant full power to try to bring the tip temperature up.

Consider what you are soldering. If you are only going to tin the end of wires and splice together small gauge wires all the time a small 30W will suffice. If on the other had you are trying to desolder LEDs mounted to a metal core PCB then you'll need a 50-80W regulated soldering iron.

An unregulated soldering iron is not good. It must maintain constant temperature. Unregulated soldering irons will if sitting idle get too hot.

My bench soldering iron is a dual head JBC and the tip mass is very small which means it gets up to temerature from when handle is removed from the holder to when it is useable is around 2 seconds or less. It also cost over $1,000.00. It also can deliver good power to the tip and solder even the heavy soldering jobs. Link to DI3000TP

I have an old Weller and a Metcal as well. I use the JBC almost exclusively. I also use a fixed 80W to solder the brass rods and boards for the AA->D battery holders. The reason the fixed 80W solders better for the brass rods is the large tip mass.

Wayne

 

[KC2IXE]

Heh - I own 2 weller soldering stations (with both size handles_ - got the set at a hamfest for a whopping $20, including about 15 spare tips

I have a much of Unger handheld units that had temp controled elements

But my latest and greatest - a 200 watt 3/4 or so diameter soldering iron - sometimes you need HEAT - like soldering BIG connectors/joints

I also have a GAS soldering iron - it's a prestolite Actyline torch that burns on the back of the iron, keeping it hot. Useful for soldering things like copper gutters outdoors

 

[Northern Lights]

I love tools and to buy tools, good tools, disposable tools, all tools. Wayne, I wish you lived next door. I would be drooling over your bench.
I just came back from a "raid" on a local Harbor Freight, 4 miles from here. Not good for my wife's discontentand the proximity of the new store. They are running sales this week.

 

[JCup]

A soldering iron sitting in the holder requires little power to keep it at temperature...

I have an old Weller and a Metcal as well. I use the JBC almost exclusively. I also use a fixed 80W to solder the brass rods and boards for the AA->D battery holders. The reason the fixed 80W solders better for the brass rods is the large tip mass.

Wayne

I agree with what you say, Wayne. Very well stated. What you say about the ability of the iron to "recover" is a key point.

I have been a production engineer in electronics assembly more than twenty years. The JBC is an interesting product. Made in Spain. I have tested their station and it performs well. Some of my colleagues have chosen the JBC and speak highly of them in practice.

Metcal stations have been the market leader for a long time, but they are being challenged on several fronts. It has been a very successful product with great technology...but,

My present recommendation for a high performance station is the Hakko FM-202. Tips are longer lasting, and much more economical. They offer these to production shops with "trade-in" deals, and buy one get two free, etc. They make more money on the tips than they do on the stations over the long haul. Look for a deal on eBay, I have seen factory refurb units there at good prices.

My employer has generally exchanged Metcal stations for the Hakko, and our operators are very happy with the Hakko stations.

Hakko is leading the world market today, and their FP and FM series (the FM has more responsive heater elements and controls) are good performers, with many tip designs.

 

[dat2zip]

I agree with what you say, Wayne. Very well stated. What you say about the ability of the iron to "recover" is a key point.

I have been a production engineer in electronics assembly more than twenty years. The JBC is an interesting product. Made in Spain. I have tested their station and it performs well. Some of my colleagues have chosen the JBC and speak highly of them in practice.

Metcal stations have been the market leader for a long time, but they are being challenged on several fronts. It has been a very successful product with great technology...but,

My present recommendation for a high performance station is the Hakko FM-202. Tips are longer lasting, and much more economical. They offer these to production shops with "trade-in" deals, and buy one get two free, etc. They make more money on the tips than they do on the stations over the long haul. Look for a deal on eBay, I have seen factory refurb units there at good prices.

My employer has generally exchanged Metcal stations for the Hakko, and our operators are very happy with the Hakko stations.

Hakko is leading the world market today, and their FP and FM series (the FM has more responsive heater elements and controls) are good performers, with many tip designs.

I can believe Hakko and others have similar or better products. I wasn't plugging the JBC. Just what I got. I ran across the JBC when I got fed up with the Metcal. The Metcal tips are terrible and they don't have any real fine tip ones. The ones that are supposed to be fine tip are larger than they should be leaving none that I was able to use at the time.

The JBC had what I wanted and the tip selection is why I chose JBC at the time. The Hakko you refer to seems to have even a better selection of tiny tips of which I'm keen on.

Too bad I didn't know about this when I was upgrading as it would be nice to check this out.

The tweezers on the JBC are incredible. I'm sure others have similar tweezers. Good soldering iron, tips make a big difference. One other trouble I had with Metcal was the plating they used on the tips. It seem to oxidize and solder would not stick to it. My trusty old Weller even tho it does't have tiny tips has always got the job done. BTW: I believe Metcal tips were initially for medical use. The one thing I miss on the Metcal is the power meter. The soldering stations when I worked at Agilent all had power meters and you can see when the tip is hot and ready by monitoring the power meter. It's all moot now as staring at the power meter is a who cares as the JBC gets hot faster than I can get it to the joint I need to solder, so "who cares".

I would love to test drive a Hakko just to see how it performs or other make and models.

Wayne

 

[wquiles]

A soldering iron sitting in the holder requires little power to keep it at temperature.

It probably takes less than 5W to keep a small tip at temperature. Most soldering iron apply heat and then coast until the tip drops a few degress. This means most of the time power is not being applied to the heating element in the tip. The old magnetic wellers had a audible click when power was applied to the tip. The magnetic tips would lose magnetism at a specific temperature like 700F and when the tip temperature would drop a few degrees the magnetic properties would pull the heating element to the tip due to magnetism and this would snap the heater forward making an audible click sound. Sitting idle they would click every minute or couple of minutes.

Touching the tip to solder something will cool the tip down. That's when the soldering iron applies power to try to regulate the tip and keep it at temperature. Soldering small SMT components is fine with a 30W type soldering iron. When the item to be soldered has less mass than the tip it doesn't require a lot of power to keep the tip at temperature.

If the soldering tip has to solder something like components on a PCB that are connected to large areas of copper the large copper area on the board will sink the tip as the thermal mass of the copper board + components will suck the heat away. In this case along with other similar situations it requires a lot more power to keep the tip at temperature. Under these conditions you'll need a 80W or higher power rating to keep the tip at temperature. Consider the worst case. Sticking the tip in a cup of water. This will cool the tip down and you will be forcing the soldering station to apply constant full power to try to bring the tip temperature up.

Consider what you are soldering. If you are only going to tin the end of wires and splice together small gauge wires all the time a small 30W will suffice. If on the other had you are trying to desolder LEDs mounted to a metal core PCB then you'll need a 50-80W regulated soldering iron.

An unregulated soldering iron is not good. It must maintain constant temperature. Unregulated soldering irons will if sitting idle get too hot.

My bench soldering iron is a dual head JBC and the tip mass is very small which means it gets up to temerature from when handle is removed from the holder to when it is useable is around 2 seconds or less. It also cost over $1,000.00. It also can deliver good power to the tip and solder even the heavy soldering jobs. Link to DI3000TP

I have an old Weller and a Metcal as well. I use the JBC almost exclusively. I also use a fixed 80W to solder the brass rods and boards for the AA->D battery holders. The reason the fixed 80W solders better for the brass rods is the large tip mass.

Wayne

+1 simply outstanding - well said

Will

 

[wquiles]

I agree with what you say, Wayne. Very well stated. What you say about the ability of the iron to "recover" is a key point.

I have been a production engineer in electronics assembly more than twenty years. The JBC is an interesting product. Made in Spain. I have tested their station and it performs well. Some of my colleagues have chosen the JBC and speak highly of them in practice.

Metcal stations have been the market leader for a long time, but they are being challenged on several fronts. It has been a very successful product with great technology...but,

My present recommendation for a high performance station is the Hakko FM-202. Tips are longer lasting, and much more economical. They offer these to production shops with "trade-in" deals, and buy one get two free, etc. They make more money on the tips than they do on the stations over the long haul. Look for a deal on eBay, I have seen factory refurb units there at good prices.

My employer has generally exchanged Metcal stations for the Hakko, and our operators are very happy with the Hakko stations.

Hakko is leading the world market today, and their FP and FM series (the FM has more responsive heater elements and controls) are good performers, with many tip designs.

At work all of the higher-end equipment, specially for all of the SMT was Metal, so out of Ebay I got myself a Metcal MX 500P-11 system with the single point want, and the Talon which is the one like a tweezer wand. I have a lower cost Weller as well, which I use for the bulk of the normal soldering - they are both good systems

Will

 

[JCup]

The JBC had what I wanted and the tip selection is why I chose JBC at the time. The Hakko you refer to seems to have even a better selection of tiny tips of which I'm keen on.

Too bad I didn't know about this when I was upgrading as it would be nice to check this out.

The tweezers on the JBC are incredible.

Wayne

Wayne, Maybe I could refer you to someone in sales, they will demo one. PM me. The FM-202 has two types of "tweezer" handsets, and the smaller one works great with 0603's and larger. Much nicer than the Talon (on the Metcal). Pretty expensive, but does have replaceable elements.

And I'm surprised to hear you say the Metcal tips are not fine enough. Are you working on 0402's? Do you have a good source on the Metcal tips? I have some complaints about Metcal (especially now that OK owns them) but they are a high performance station, and they have a lot of tips.

I did have a demo JBC, and it was impressive. As I recall it had an excellent cast base/handset holder. We evaluated, but chose Hakko, and it was to a large degree based on the deal they offered us and the fact that distributors seemed to have a lot more Hakko inventory. But I would not hesitate to recommend. You can adjust temps on the FM-202.

Interesting discussion. Hey, have you ever tried Almit KR-19 brand wire solder? It's amazing stuff.

 

[dat2zip]

Wayne, Maybe I could refer you to someone in sales, they will demo one. PM me. The FM-202 has two types of "tweezer" handsets, and the smaller one works great with 0603's and larger. Much nicer than the Talon (on the Metcal). Pretty expensive, but does have replaceable elements.

And I'm surprised to hear you say the Metcal tips are not fine enough. Are you working on 0402's? Do you have a good source on the Metcal tips? I have some complaints about Metcal (especially now that OK owns them) but they are a high performance station, and they have a lot of tips.

I did have a demo JBC, and it was impressive. As I recall it had an excellent cast base/handset holder. We evaluated, but chose Hakko, and it was to a large degree based on the deal they offered us and the fact that distributors seemed to have a lot more Hakko inventory. But I would not hesitate to recommend. You can adjust temps on the FM-202.

Interesting discussion. Hey, have you ever tried Almit KR-19 brand wire solder? It's amazing stuff.

Almit? What? I went to their site to check it out and most of the links or pages don't work. Got more info? I'm interested.

The reason Metcal doesn't work is I solder many leadless ICs and the pad width is 0.015" or so. This means if the end of the tip is too large or round it never makes contact with the side of the IC or the pad on the PCB.

All the tips I have from Metcal which is dated some year or two ago were at least twice the specification. None at the time were able to solder the leadless. The tips from JBC were precision made and were truely finer than Metcal. What took me 45 minutes of dragging the tip back and forth now worked in one swipe or two for drag soldering.

What happens to compound this problem is whether the IC is sitting dead on or offset slightly. It's not uncommon for the IC to be shifted towards one side or the other. Rarely is it dead on. The means the side the IC has shifted towards leaves less pcb pad exposed. These require even a smaller diameter tip and even the ones I'm using still leaving me the desire to get smaller ones if they were possible.

Looking at one of the footprints the recommended pad width is 0.25mm or 0.00984". That would suggest a tip diameter size no larger than 0.25mm or smaller to touch both pad and IC. The smallest tip I have IIRC is 0.3mm.



Wayne

 

[dat2zip]

I think I have a solution or at least something better than what I have now. I talked to the rep for JBC and found the 2210 handpiece has two tips that go down to 0.2mm in diameter. The 2245 handpiece smallest tip is 0.3mm.

This should help immensly as I'm already using the tweezers whose tips are 0.2mm and that I'm familiar with and think that having 0.2mm tip would make soldering the leadless ics easier.

It seems all my 0.3mm tips are bludgeon now and the tip has mushroom to something larger.

Wayne