I hate soldering

I had to click, because it turns out that I love soldering. It's relaxing and has a skill curve such that there's a trick to it but with a bit of practice, you can be someone who is really good at soldering, too.

For anyone reading, the key is to invest in a proper stereo microscope and a decent fume extractor.

I recommend this one: https://www.strangeparts.com/a-boy-and-his-microscope-a-love...

If you're up for a bit of a bonus round, I absolutely love my Pixel Pump. https://shop.robins-tools.com/products/pixel-pump

I picked up a used Ninja toaster oven and hacked a https://reflowmasterpro.com/ to it. I also modified the plans for Stencil Fix to make it substantially bigger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am3ztQIkss0

So, I do a fair bit of both reflow and hand SMD soldering at this point, depending on what the situation calls for. It's great fun.

For anyone thinking about learning to solder, there are several levels of what you can do with a soldering iron. The surface-mount stuff and ovens and microscopes, that's like level 3.

Level 1 is just being able to take two wires and connect them, reliably and cleanly. That's already immensely useful and requires very little skill and equipment. $50 gets you a nice soldering pen, another $50 gets you some tweezers, some flux and a roll of solder and you're set. Work near an open window and have a desk fan blow the fumes away from you, and you're already being more responsible than most people.

Level 2 is something like through-hole soldering, soldering wires to pads, the kind of stuff you'd do working with ESP32, building RC cars, FPV drones or custom IoT devices. Still easy to learn, just a few simple rules. Work quickly, know when to give up and let things cool down. Avoid touching the expensive e-ink display with your soldering iron. Get something better for fume extraction, spend 10 hours soldering and bam, you're better at soldering than literally 99% people out there, you can build and repair all kinds of stuff. This is where most of the cool YouTube stuff happens, your rctestflight and Tom Stanton and Stuff Made Here and Styropyro. You can do most of that with $300-$800 worth of gear, depending on how brave you are.

And then you can worry about SMDs and reflowing and other arcane stuff, or decide that you probably won't need it.

He's soldering like it's fifty years ago.

Everything is lead-free surface mount now. Solder paste, stencils, reflow ovens. Hand soldering is precision temperature controlled irons, hot air rework stations, magnifiers, cameras, and exhaust fans. The tools are more complicated, more expensive, and better.

One of the lessons of surface mount work is that you really can move your fingers a thousandth of an inch. But you need magnification to see what you're doing.

I'm encouraged to see more hobbyists going surface mount. In my TechShop days, I was the only one doing surface mount. Everybody else was using 1980s 0.1 inch spacing DIP components. That's a US thing. If you learn to solder in Shenzhen, you start with surface mount.

I became significantly better at electronics soldering by learning to do glasswork (stain glass fixturing, etc). It wasn't intentional and it isn't even the same solder chemistry, but having to do broad asthetics on large pieces meant I "got it" better for the small scale electronics connections.

I got into soldering as a child, but never learned how to do it properly. Years later I found this comic-book-style guide somewhere online, which made it quite easy to do without messing it up: https://mightyohm.com/files/soldercomic/FullSolderComic_EN.p...

I love soldering, even though my skill ceiling is SMD components. There is something almost spiritual and humbling about soldering because you cannot force your will onto the solder, you have to listen to what the solder wants to do and work with it, not against it.

When I first tried my hand at soldering I was using the "butter knife" method: apply solder to the iron, then try to smear it onto the wire like spreading butter with a butter knife. Of course the solder would never stick to where I wanted it to go. I had to learn that solder goes to where the heat is, so I instead had to heat the components or wires instead and then feed the solder onto the hot components. I also had to learn that a soldering iron is not a pencil, sometimes even when doing small parts you want to use the large tip. Don't try to tell the solder where to go, instead apply a big blog and watch it snap into place on its own.

Last year I installed an HDMI mod[1] into my Wii, this has been so far the hardest project. It took me many attempts to get it right, mainly because I was working against the solder instead of with it. But now that I have succeeded I could easily do it over and over again (not keen on the disassembly and reassembly of the console though).

EDIT: while I'm at it I might as well mention the iron I was using: the Pinecil[2]. It's a really neat and fast soldering iron at a very cheap price. Great for people like me who don't want hardware store cheap garbage, but also cannot justify buying an entire soldering station.

[1] https://electron-shepherd.com/collections/kits-mods/products... [2] https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-solde...

Love-hate relationship here. I make and fly drones as a hobby (mostly build-since around July last year, 98% of the times, when weekends come, it's always raining). While soldering can be fun, I hate soldering big, fat cables on large pads, it's just so tedious, even with a powerful soldering iron.

I feel like this poem isn't really about soldering, but if anyone is actually bothered by it, there are some options.

Unleaded solder and a decent fume extractor make the process cleaner. A decent soldering iron and solder wire with good-quality flux (e.g. Kester) makes it faster.

If you'd rather not deal with the iron, you can manually apply solder paste and use a hot air rework tool or even a heat gun (careful!) to melt it. (A proper reflow oven is better, of course, but that's pricey.) This makes working with surface-mount components much easier.

If you'd rather not deal with it at all, have a PCB assembled somewhere else. JLC is pretty cheap, especially on simpler boards.

This is somewhat off topic, but a question to Americans: Why do none of you seem to pronounce the "l" in soldering? Every US video seems to say "soddering"

Some nice Schlieren photography on show here too [0]. Also seen on John Martyn's Solid Air [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieren_photography [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Air

Soldering is something where bad tools do genuinely make it extremely hard to do a good job. I used my dad's old soldering iron for a while, where it just plugs into the wall and gets hot, with no other temperature control than (I assume) some kind of thermal switch to stop it melting. I always hated soldering with that thing, and my joints looked awful. Then I got a pinecil, and my experience changed completely. Super cheap, heats up in seconds, does perfect soldering, and makes everything so much more fun and easy. Heavily recommend if you want to solder but are having problems with your existing iron https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-solde...

To each their own. I find soldering (with a nice iron!) very therapeutic, much like knitting. I'll put on a good album or catch up with some friends on the phone.

If you're impatient, plenty of fab houses (like JLCPCB) will do all the soldering for you, for about 0.1 cents per SMD joint or 2 cents per THT joint...

When i was in college I was soldering something really small (don't remember what it was) and flicked molten solder right in to the tear duct on the inside corner of one of my eyes. Not fun but didn't hurt anything permanently.

Thanks for all the advice! For context, this poem was only partially about soldering. It's also about questions regarding ever-progressing technology on Earth, which I think some caught on to. I did use solder paste and a heat gun with a fume extractor after writing this poem. :)

Of all the threads to not have a single bad comment!

(as of 11:10pm PST 2026-05-11, I hasten to add)

Soldering is fun, especially if you designed the circuit and the pcb yourself. It's like putting together your own frankenstein, with a huge amount of anticipation toward when you finally get to give it power. Just be sure to get the polarity right on those electrolytic caps ;-)

Soldering was my favorite part of ee course in the university… i even kinda liked the fume..

Any tips on how to improve soldering? I just started learning electronics, it’s so fun with Claude doing the code for the device.

So get yourself a solder fume extractor? There's plenty cheap ones to pick from.

Whatever happened to wire wrapping? That used to be a viable alternative.

As long as it isn't soldering connectors, I like it.

Connectors tho... PITA

Watching skillful SMT soldering on YouTube fascinates me in a way that helps me understand the ASMR videos that the kids watch these days.

I've used pretty good soldering stations at work and at home. But I needed to set up a new station at my workplace, and asked our best technician to recommend a new unit. He recommended Hakko FX-971, and I got one despite the price (to my employer), with 3 sizes of tips.

It was a true splurge, but I love it. Warm-up in 15 seconds, and the tips are integrated with the heaters so there's no thermal contact to worry about. Tiny and big tips both work great. You can change tips while they're hot.

At home I have a typical Weller station, and it's OK for the electronics side business that I run, but nothing like that Hakko.

... and I love soldering.

I enjoy soldering. I enjoy using solder paste, being a human pick and place machine, and then putting boards in the oven. I enjoy building physical devices.

But then I had a hardware startup and learnt something about myself.

I enjoy building one or two of something. I absolutely hate building anything more than that.

I disagree, it’s a joy actually, shame that jobs that involve soldering don’t pay well, yes, even embedded engineers aren’t paid that well plus soldering is less than 10% of the work.

I hate to say I love the fumes - that rosin smell is unique. Did many soldering projects in an enclosed area back when I was a kid. Everyone worked that way years ago. I wonder if the fumes kill more people than being neurotic about the fumes.

Anti-Schematic fantastic

Hacked the physical: pentastic!

Got the pump-wickin' stickin',

Who didn't turn off the bench?

Where's the 100x lens Gibson?

IC damage and bits of French

Master fine STM RPI ATM 329

Fuckin' A to the Zed

Fill your lungs with lead

Y'all shit's funded by

Venture rebrands for A&I.

Nice poem.

[dead]