Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Soldering recommendations?

Anybody recommend a decent soldering iron/solder for work within Meridian speakers? Need high convenience for working within enclosed spaces and the best solder for use with speakers.

Cheers,

Mark

There are 100's that would be fine. Weller is sort of THE name in soldering Irons. It depends on what you plan to do. Like if you are changing a driver a $6.00 radio shack one would be fine. But if you want to say remove a surface mount resistor you want a speacial iron/gun for that.

But a really nice general purpose one would be something like like this.

http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?partnumber=372-145

Or if you want a cheaper one. This is what I have.

http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?partnumber=372-120

But be sure to get one with a Temp Control.

The more expensive ones have feedback for temp and display. The cheap one runs blind.

I would use a silver solder for hifi work. Also, get yourself a �20 soldering fumes extraction fan; I once had a really nasty experience where the flux inflamed my throat.

Just want it for driver changes - I keep popping them

I have an iron which came with a belkin toolkit but I find it's cable length restrictive so looking for something less restrictive and most suited to driver work...

Mark

Mark,

George has made some fine recommendations on soldering irons, I've used lots of Weller's in my past life as a hardware design engineer in the networking industry and they work just dandy.

Since you mention that you are using it for replacing driver's I presume that means you are soldering fairly heavy gauge speaker wire to the driver's terminals, yes? In that case, I would highly recommend a fairly high-wattage iron. As the heavy speaker wire is going to act as a significant heat sink, you want an iron that can quickly heat up the work surface to allow the solder to flow, without heating up too much length of the wire itself. A lower wattage iron will eventually get things hot enough to solder, but may overheat the finer gauge wire of the voice coil in the driver.

Just some thoughts...

Dan

Dan - that's very useful. Yes, the only job for now is unsoldering existing drivers and resoldering replacement drivers in place. I can physically use a soldering iron but don't necessarily appreciate the finer details like high heat etc. so that is useful.

Mark

" In that case, I would highly recommend a fairly high-wattage iron. As the heavy speaker wire is going to act as a significant heat sink, you want an iron that can quickly heat up the work surface to allow the solder to flow, without heating up too much length of the wire itself."

The opposite thought of that is an iron that transfers heat much quicker into the joint so that there is less time to heat up surrounding components and you use less temperature overall to do this. This is what Metcal irons do for example and they are fantastic. I've soldered ground lugs together holding them with bare fingers very near the joint and gotten perfect joints and no burned fingers.

Shawn

Shawn,

Metcal irons are pretty awesome and were my overall favorite iron to use when I left hardware design a couple of years ago, especially when soldering extremely fine-pitch leaded components and 0201/0402 sized discretes.

I don't think your example is an opposite view of what I stated, however. The Metcal is a pretty high-wattage iron, it's just incredibly smart about how it applies its wattage to bring up the temp of the soldering site. In the case of the ground lugs you soldered, it's dumping quite a bit of wattage and heat into the area so that it heats up to soldering temp before the heat gets transferred away by the heat sink of your ground plane (or wire). That is, the Metcal is only applying enough wattage to heat the soldering site to the required temperature. For fine-pitch stuff, it doesn't take much wattage to do so. For ground planes and the like, it takes quite a bit of wattage.

My point isn't related to the temperature of the iron, as the temperature required is a function of the melting point of the solder, but rather having enough wattage to maintain/achieve that temperature quickly when the material being soldered is simultaneously trying to leach away that heat.

Dan

ps - for those that don't know about Metcal irons, we're also talking a pretty significant cost multiplier over the Weller iron that George pointed out previously. I haven't looked recently, but I'd guess about 4x the price of the Weller, plus another $50 to $100 for the smart tips used by the iron handle.

i would recommend to use Eutectic type solder, something like Cardas Tri-Eutectic. it has very nice feature - rapidly goes liquid and then back to solid with the same rapid style, no plastic phase.

Dan,

"My point isn't related to the temperature of the iron, as the temperature required is a function of the melting point of the solder, but rather having enough wattage to maintain/achieve that temperature quickly when the material being soldered is simultaneously trying to leach away that heat."

OK. In that case we are talking about the same thing with regards to something like the Metcal which strongly regulates the wattage to hold temperature constant based on whatever tip you are using. There is obviously a huge difference between the Metcal with a 600 degree tip in it and a Weller 100w pencil iron.

", we're also talking a pretty significant cost multiplier over the Weller iron that George pointed out previously. "

Also very true. From time to time there are some good deals on complete used MX-500s on eBay. If one does a lot of soldering the tool is well worth the money. After using Weller stations for years I was amazed how much better the Metcal was when I bought it.

Shawn

The driver wires in the DSP speakers are not that heavy (#18 or #16 max) and I have used the the cheaper weller one I listed above no problem.

Don't forget that for the last 2 years, all consumer electronics gear in the EU has to be RoHS compliant which means lead free solder is used.