What the hell is going wrong with my soldering tonight? It's been a hot minute since I've done any, but it shouldn't be *this* terrible all of a sudden. I don't think I'm doing anything different but it's like the pads are refusing to 'wet' at all and I'm having to carefully trace the iron right around in order to draw solder around each pin. I'm even having trouble getting the solder to melt onto the tip of the iron. I've never had it misbehave this much at me before.
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@timixretroplays oooooof. Yeah give the boards some heat, 50°C should be helpful
@timixretroplays or your iron has fallen out of temperature regulation, do you have a thermistor that can measure its tip?
@timixretroplays iron temperature correct for the type of solder? They look like very cold joints. Also is it freezing cold where you’re doing this? Point a heat gun at it for a minute or two to get some heat into the PCB
@jpm it's a good 18 or 19 degrees in here, 50% humidity. It's like it's just not melting well onto the iron even - which is at 240 degrees, well enough for cheap Jaycar solder. I don't understand it at all, it's like physics just pauses when I try. Normally it's contact for a second, push some solder into the joint, hold for a second or two and release - but I'm holding solder against the iron and the joint for 10+ seconds and nothing's going anywhere.
Going to try a couple of different irons.
@timixretroplays what kind of solder? 60/40 SnPb? 240 should be fine, I usually go 250 for SnPb and 300 for lead-free, but you may want to try going up to 275 or so. It’s also possible the thermistor or the heater in the iron is failing so it’s not actually getting hot enough.
@timixretroplays also a good clean if it’s failing to stick - first on the wet sponge, then on the brass pad, and then into a tip refresher if you’ve got any
@timixretroplays it may also be lack of flux, and a bit of flux and a tap of a hot iron should fix it up in either case.
Like, what even is this? It's like no board I try soldering a thing to actually takes the solder. It wasn't like this the last time I wanted to do a big batch of soldering stuff. Iron is the same, solder is the same, some of the boards were made in the last week but plenty of them weren't.
Is it just too cold a day to solder? Are the boards too cold? Should I be warming parts on the 3D printer before attempting to solder them?