🚀 go-pugleaf

OK, I know I'm late.

(came across this while looking for John Popelish' original description
of his technique for etching PCBs by floating on FeCl, to refer a friend
to.  Thanks John :)

I have made my own soldering iron tips or refurbished those paramagneticaly
heat controlled Weller tips (which seem to me to be getting harder and harder
to find)

I always used nickel plating over the copper.

A little nickel chloride in hydrochloric acid for plating solution,
and a lab supply with the current limit set for a 100-200ma

Caveat:
I believe nickel chloride is rather hideously poisonous.
http://physchem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/NI/nickel_II_chloride.html

And by the by, it's easy enough to remove the little bit of paramagnetic
alloy (or what ever it's called) from those Weller tips and attach it to
a similar tip that doesn't have it (but is probably easier to find)

>ozi wrote:
>> 
>> G'day,
>> I have a lathe an all different types of metal and was considering the
>> possibility of making my own 'custom' soldering iron tips. Can anyone
>> tell me if they're made of a special type of metal or if they're plated
>> with anything.
>> I was going to use stainless steel.
>> 
>I think you will have trouble getting the solder to wet stainless
>(which is stainless because it coats itself with a protective oxide
>layer), though if you use a very active acid flux, you might get it
>coated. But never use acid flux for electronic soldering after the tip
>is tinned.  It is strictly for plumbing use.  
>
>Cheap bits are pure copper, or high copper alloys, but copper wets
>with solder so well because it dissolves in it.  Pure iron (low alloy)
>is only very slightly soluble in solder, so it is consumed many times
>slower than copper, but is a poorer conductor of heat (and stainless
>is worse than iron).  So the best bits are pure copper inside, for
>heat transfer, with a pure iron plating for long life.  Remember that
>any iron surface that is to be wet with solder must be fluxed before
>heating and tinned immediately upon heating to get it covered with a
>protective layer of solder before it oxidizes or solder will roll off
>it like water off a duck. 
>
>-- 
>John Popelish


Bogax