How to Replace Soldering Iron Tips

Different soldering jobs require different sizes and shapes of soldering iron tips: for example, you’ll need a small tip to solder small circuit boards; it’s easiest to solder integrated circuits with a specialized tip designed for multiple pin configurations; and larger tips are best for soldering sizeable cables.

Most soldering iron manufacturers provide a variety of soldering iron tips. Although soldering iron tips are rarely interchangeable between manufacturers, the tip replacement process is largely the same. In addition to your soldering iron and additional soldering iron tips, you may need a set of small pliers.

Before you start, ensure your soldering iron is unplugged and allow it to completely cool so you don’t burn yourself. Once you’re sure the iron has cooled, unscrew the locking nut holding sleeve that secures the tip and currently installed soldering iron tip. You may be able to unscrew the nut by hand if you frequently change tips. If the locking nut is frozen, use a set of small pliers to unscrew it.

Once you’ve unscrewed the nut, slide the retaining sleeve and nut off the soldering iron’s heating element and remove the soldering iron tip from the sleeve. Place the replacement tip into the retaining sleeve and then slide it back onto the heating element of the soldering iron. The last step is to slide the retaining nut over the sleeve and soldering iron tip and tighten by hand so that you can easily replace the tip next time.

Be sure not to over-tighten the locking nut beyond what you can do by hand. Your soldering iron expands and contracts as it heats and cools. Excessively tightening the locking nut may cause the nut to bind and make future tip replacement needlessly difficult.

In order to maximize soldering iron performance and extend the operating life of your soldering iron tips, you should keep all tips well tinned, which involves removing any oxidation and contaminants and coating the tip with a thin layer of solder. You can read more about tinning soldering iron tips.

Soldering Tattoo Needles (Part Two)

(Continued from Part One, which you can read here.)

You may be wondering how tattoo needle manufacturers group individual needles in a configuration like a flat, and how they’re made loose or tight. Loose and tight needle groupings are created with the jig. A jig can be as simple as a tool the size of a drill bit, or you can buy custom jigs specifically designed for tattooing. When you build your own needles you’ll use solder, heat, and flux, so your jig will need to be a type of material to which the solder and needles won’t stick. Choose your jig wisely.

Here’s how you create a loose or tight needle grouping. You lay out the needles and then place them in the jig where you’ll do the initial soldering with soldering iron. If the needle grouping needs to be tighter — like when you’re building a liner configuration — you’ll need to remove the grouping from the jig and place it in a smaller or tighter hole, thus compressing the grouping. After the needles have been compressed, you resolder the needles.

The distance from the tip of the needles to the point where you solder the needles together will influence whether a grouping is loose or tight. A higher solder point will give the needles a little more flexibility, softening the tattoo. Because you need a stiffer configuration, a typical liner will be soldered lower down the grouping with more solder and flux than a shader or loose grouping will.

Let’s take a second to outline how you identify needle groupings by looking at the manufacturer’s blister pack. A 1214RS needle consists of twelve-gauge needles (12) in a group of fourteen individual needles (14) in a round configuration that is loose or a shader (S), so a 1215RS is a fourteen round shader. A 1215CM consists ofsoldering fifteen twelve-gauge needles in a curved mag configuration.

When you know how manufacturers commonly group needles, you can use this information for soldering your own needle groupings. With the right soldering equipment, knowledge of needle groupings, and a little practice, you will be able to solder your very own tattoo needles.

Soldering Tattoo Needles (Part One)

Tattooing can be expensive, but you can cut costs by educating yourself in certain subjects — for example, you can save money by soldering your own tattoo needles. Buying pre-made and -sterilized tattoo needles is commonplace these days, but there was a time when every apprentice had to solder their own needles. If you’re going to be a good tattoo artist, you need to know the tools of your trade, and making your own needles is a great way to better understand your craft. You’ll need to purchase a soldering station or soldering iron if you don’t already own one.

When we talk about a tattoo needles, we’re not talking

about a single needle like the kind you see at the doctor’s office — we’re talking about a group of needles soldered to a needle bar. The needles have different diameters, lengths, and tapers. There are also textured needles, which have pits in the needle for potentially carrying more ink.

You create tattoo needles by soldering a group of needles to a needle bar or back stem. The needle bars are around four-and-a-half to five inches long, and all needle bars designed for tattooing have a loop or eyelet at one end. The needle groups can be made into whatever shape you want, but the most commonly used groupings are flats, magnums, and rounds. Flats are used for shading, magnums for fill work, and rounds for line or portrait work.

You make rounds by soldering the needles in a circular pattern. Tight rounds are best for line work; loose rounds are better for shading. You solder needles side-by-side in a row to create flats. Flats can be tight or loose as well, though most tattoo artists prefer loose groupings for shading. Magnums are soldered side-by-side like flats, but they are separated into lower and upper rows, or they are double stacked.

Making your own tattoo needles is a painstaking process, at least in the beginning, and you’ll need to have the proper equipment before you can get started. In addition to your soldering station or iron, you’ll also need solder, flux, and you may want different soldering iron tips for cleaner solder joints. You will need to tin a new or dirty soldering iron tip, which involves coating the soldering tip with a thin layer of solder. Whether you buy or make your own needles, they must be individually packaged and autoclaved before use.

(Continued in Part Two, which you can read here.)

Soldering Safety

If you are working on an electronics project, you are probably soldering. Soldering can be dangerous: solder produces toxic fumes, your soldering iron is extremely hot, the solder gets very hot as well, and you may get air pockets or impurities that can pop as you heat the solder, sending molten solder flying unexpectedly and unpredictably. Because of these potential hazards, you need to follow some rules while soldering.

1) Wear goggles to protect your eyes. You must be careful when you trim leads or solder dross because a flyaway could injure you and others working in the vici

nity.

2) Never inhale fumes while soldering. Always work in a well-ventilated space, preferably with a fume extractor.

3) You must return the soldering iron to its stand (if you have a soldering station, it will be built-in) when you are not using it — do not leave it sitting on your workbench for any amount of time. The soldering iron tip is around four hundred degrees Celsius, so be careful; avoid touching wire insulation, plastic, and all other nearby flammable materials with the soldering iron. If you won’t be using the soldering iron for a few minutes, switch the soldering station to standby or turn off your soldering iron. Once you have finished soldering, turn off the unit and/or unplug it.

4) Another important way to avoid nasty burns is to use helping hands, clamps, pliers, tweezers, or a circuit board vice to hold your components. Ensure that your arms and legs are covered to avoid being burned by splashed solder.

5) Keep food and drink away from the working area. Traditional solder is a tin/lead alloy, and the lead is toxic. Flux is used to help metal pieces stay soldered together, and it is both acidic and toxic: flux will damage clothing and cause acid burns to your skin which, if they occur, you should immediately flush with water. If you spill any flux, clean it up immediately. Be sure to wash your hands after soldering.

6) Always thoroughly wash your hands after you have handled flux or leaded solder. Use lead-free solder — if you can — to reduce potential hazards.

7) After you’ve finished soldering, completely clean the area and discard any leftover lead and silver solder as well as dross in a lidded container, and then label the container (e.g. “Solder Waste”). Contaminated rags and solder sponges should be discarded as hazardous waste.

Caring for Your Soldering Iron Tip

Most contemporary soldering iron tips are made of a copper core surrounded by iron that is nickel- or chrome-plated. The plating on the chisel’s tip is removed, thus exposing the iron cladding, and solder doesn’t stick to the nickel/chrome. Solder will, however, stick to the soldering iron. Keep the tip coated with a thin layer of tin so that it will not rust and so that you receive the optimal heat at the tip, which will in turn extend the life of the soldering iron tip as well as improve performance.

Because solder can build up on your tip and reduce heat transfer, which makes it more difficult to solder, be sure to use high-quality solder. Note that 60/40, 50/50, 63/37, and lead-free solder have different working ranges. Keep the tip of your soldering iron clean while you work: wipe the tip on a damp sponge (if you have a soldering station you should have one built-in) to keep it clean and ensure maximum heat at the tip. Alternatively, you can use metal mesh pads to clean the tip of your soldering iron.

While you want to keep the tip clean, excessively wiping it on a damp sponge can lead to premature tip failure, because the tip temperature will rise and fall dramatically, causing the metal to expand and contract. This cycle will cause the metal to fatigue and the tip will eventually collapse. The more you wipe the soldering iron tip, the more you stress the metal.

Flux is corrosive, so don’t try to clean the tip by dipping it in flux. Also, never clean with sandpaper or other abrasive materials. Minimize tip maintenance by using a quality solder with high tin content and high-purity metal. When you finish a soldering session, clean the tip, flood the tip with preferably 63/37 or 60/40 solder, wipe it clean again, and unplug the soldering iron in order to flush and re-tin the tip, which protects it from oxidation and corrosion.

You can keep the tip from seizing (i.e. becoming stuck in the barrel) by loosening the nut or screw securing it. It’s easy to damage the heating element when you try to remove a seized tip. Make sure the tip is properly seated when reinserting the tip.

If you blacken your soldering iron tip and you can’t clean it with your sponge, you can use a tinning block or a brass brush. Tinning block is a self-ammoniac which you use by rubbing the tip of your hot soldering iron through a small amount of flux you place on the block. You then wipe the tip on a damp sponge to remove the debris. If your tip is especially dirty, you may have to repeat this process several times. Keep in mind that tinning block is abrasive and frequent use will wear away the iron cladding prematurely, thus exposing the copper core and ruining the tip.

LEAD-FREE SOLDER: CHARACTERISTICS AND DIFFERENCES

The Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS), adopted by the European Union in 2003, changed the world of electronics manufacturing forever — especially with regard to solder. The lead-free solder necessary for RoHS compliance presents a set of unique challenges to PCB-manufacturing businesses.

While no one is disputing the fact that lead-free solder is less hazardous to those working in PCB assembly, working with unleaded solder has its complications. Lead-free solder doesn’t flow as easily as traditional leaded solder and, compared to a PCB using leaded solder, the soldered joints on a circuit board using lead-free solder will look noticeably different. You’ll also notice a dearth of top fill on through-plated PCBs (you’ll seldom get more than a seventy-five percent fill). In addition you’ll notice that unleaded solder joints are less shiny than joints using traditional solder because of the differences between the alloys.

It’s important to note that lead-free solder melts at a higher temperature than leaded solder. The exact melting temperature depends on the particular unleaded alloy you choose. A common mixture is ninety-nine percent tin, point seven percent copper, and point three percent silver; this alloy will melt and flow pretty well at two hundred seventy-five degrees.

Replacing and Modifying Equipment

There’s a good chance that the majority of your existing soldering equipment will need modification or replacement for lead-free soldering. You will at least need to replace your soldering irons’ tips — to avoid possible contamination issues — or you may need to replace your soldering irons and soldering stations altogether if they can’t reach the higher temperatures required for melting unleaded solder. Larger soldering equipment (e.g., wave soldering machines) will likely need to have their soldering baths replaced and you should consider replacing your flux as well because the PCBs you’ll be soldering will be lead-free, too.

With regard to solder pots and other types of hand-operated soldering equipment, you can either replace their baths or you could empty the equipment of solder, clean the bath, and coat it with oxide paint, which will save you some money; once the oxide paint has dried you can go ahead and fill your bath with lead-free solder and you’ll be ready to begin soldering again. While transitioning from traditional solder to unleaded solder can seem like a hassle, it’s rather easy and requires minor adaptation.

SOLDERING IRONS: WATTAGE VERSUS TEMPERATURE

A soldering iron has to rapidly heat metal parts above the temperature commonly used in electrical and electronic work — 60/40 or 63/37 tin/lead melts between three hundred sixty and three hundred seventy degrees — in order to make good connections. The solder you apply to the joint will melt and flow smoothly after it has been quickly heated. If your soldering iron heats too slowly the heat will be able to transfer to your components (resistor, capacitor, etc.) which can cause them to overheat and become damaged and, if you’re soldering insulated wire, too-slow heating can cause the insulation to weaken or melt.

Soldering tip temperatures are generally set between seven hundred fifty and eight hundred fifty degrees so that the temperature of the solder will raise above its melting point. Given that most solders have melting points below four hundred degrees you might be wondering why the soldering tip gets so hot. The answer is that using a higher temperature stores heat in the tip, thus speeding up the melting process; this enables you to solder your connections without applying excessive pressure on the joint. In addition, these high temperatures allow the proper formation of intermetallic layering between the components and solder to form, which is crucial for creating reliable electrical and mechanical solder joints.

Since we’ve established that the temperature is perhaps the most important aspect of choosing a soldering iron or soldering station, the next point of confusion is that soldering irons and stations are rated in watts rather than degrees. Most inexpensive soldering irons are actually unregulated, which means that the temperature of the tip isn’t controlled; they don’t advertise a temperature because the tip’s temperature will significantly change during use. The following data on certain unregulated soldering irons (fifteen, twenty-five, and forty watt) will shed some light on why choosing the right wattage is important.

A fifteen watt soldering iron has a resting temperature of roughly five hundred forty degrees Fahrenheit. However the temperature will drop to around four hundred twenty degrees after briefly wiping the tip on a damp sponge and soldering a couple PC board pads. This happens because the iron’s fifteen watt heat-storage capacity can’t maintain its resting temperature during use — it doesn’t have the capacity or the ability to restore temperature so it quickly cools when used. You can work around this limitation by allowing some rest periods between soldering joints, but if you’re doing work that requires more heating power — e.g., tinning a stranded wire — a fifteen watt iron won’t have enough power to get the job done.

A twenty-five watt iron has a resting temperature of around six hundred forty degrees and will retain much of its resting temperature (i.e., over six hundred twenty degrees) after soldering more than ten PC board pads. With regard to tinning wire, a twenty-five watt soldering iron can handle fourteen gauge wire well, but it lacks the power to tin ten or twelve gauge wire. If you tried to tin a ten gauge wire you can get the iron’s tip hot enough to melt solder in around two minutes, but by that time the insulation is hot enough to melt as well. The goal is to heat the surfaces being soldered, so we don’t want to heat the surfaces for more than a couple seconds or we risk damaging components and wires.

A forty watt soldering iron’s resting temperature is roughly seven hundred forty degrees and will keep a tip temperature of over seven hundred degrees through repeated PC pad solders. While a forty watt iron has enough power to easily tin twelve and fourteen gauge wire, ten gauge wire will still be on the slower side. Lower wattage soldering irons and soldering stations can really slow down your work and may not be suited to the electrical or electronic work that you’ll be doing.

HOW TO REPLACE ELECTRIC GUITAR PICKUPS

Swapping the pickups in your guitar can dramatically affect its tone; you can transform a student model guitar into tone machine that nails your favorite sound simply by installing the right combination of pickups and tone/volume potentiometers, and it’s surprisingly easy to do.

(Note: It’s best if you already have experience with a soldering iron.)

First things first: you’ll need wire cutters (preferably needlenose), new strings, a Phillips head screwdriver, solder, and a soldering station or iron. Every electric guitarist should invest in a good soldering iron, because almost all the electronic repairs you’ll ever need to do require one.

Remove your guitar strings to make things easier on yourself. On a rear-routed guitar you’ll remove the plastic plate on the back of the guitar or, if you have a Fender-style guitar, you’ll remove the entire pickguard to which the pickups are attached. Be sure to keep the screws organized according to where they came from, i.e., keep pickups screws, screws from the pickguard or backplate, etc. in separate piles.

Next you should orient yourself by identifying where the jack is, which potentiometer is which, where the selector is at, and how the wires connect the various parts. Use your needlenose pliers to pull out and separate the wires to make things easier, but don’t pull any wires out completely, as this will damage both the wires and components.

Take your new pickup and pull each colored wire out. Strip an inch or so of the black wire coming out of the pickup. After that pull each of your new pickup’s wires out and apart from each other. On rear-mounted guitars you’ll then feed the new pickup’s wires into the cavity making sure there is enough space in the cavity for the new pickup’s wiring.

Let your soldering iron warm up for five to ten minutes. Examine where the guitar’s current pickup’s wires solder to the jack, pots, etc. while you wait. Desolder one by putting the soldering iron’s tip to the solder point. Be sure that you’re desoldering the wires for the pickup you’re replacing, which can be accomplished by pulling on that pickup’s wire.

Break out the needlenose pliers again and pull the wire from the liquified solder. If you have a desoldering bulb you can suck up the excess solder — otherwise take the correspondingly colored wire from your new pickup and solder it where the old one was. If the point where you’re soldering has a hole, loop the wire through first. Hold your solder to this point and touch it with the soldering iron to get just enough solder to secure the wire. Do this for each wire and solder point.

Take the old pickup out, plug your guitar into your amp, and turn it up. Touch the new pickup’s screws and magnets with a screwdriver and, if you hear a popping noise each time you tap the screws or pole pieces, you’ve successfully soldered your new pickup in place.

Screw the pickup in position — with the wire facing down, i.e., toward the bridge — replace the backplate or pickguard, and restring your guitar. That’s all there is to it.

Building a Distortion Pedal with a Kit

Distortion pedals — which compress the peaks of your electric guitar’s sound wave and add overtones, resulting in a warmer, dirtier, and fuzzier guitar tone popular in rock, blues, punk, and metal music — are the most popular effects pedals around and you can easily build your own distortion pedal with a kit. Let’s have a look at the process of distortion pedal assembly. You’ll need a distortion pedal kit, wire strippers, a screwdriver, and a soldering iron.

Build Process

First off, you’ll need your distortion pedal kit, which you can buy from a number of online retailers. There are a variety of different types of distortion pedals so you’ll need to make a decision on what type of distortion suits the music you play. A Tube Screamer-type pedal sounds much different than pedals based on Big Muff or Turbo Rat circuits. If you play grunge or punk music you’ll want a fuzzier distortion pedal with lots of overdrive and, if you play the blues, you’ll want a pedal with good compression and more midrange.

Take the components from your kit and attach them in the appropriate places on the perfboard. The components will plug straight into the board and should fit securely in their respective slots. These components consist of capacitors, transistors, and diodes. Every kit is different, so be sure to consult your kit’s schematic to find out what goes where.

Strip the kit’s wires’ ends with your wire strippers and wrap the stripped ends around the terminals of each of the components. The wires are likely all one color, meaning that you don’t have specific wires for specific components. Although all kits are different, you can expect to connect five to ten wires to the terminals.

After allowing your soldering iron or soldering station to warm up, solder the wire connections. A mildly active rosin-core solder is best for these kinds of circuits.

Attach the perfboard to the bottom of the pedal’s chassis. Use your screwdriver and the included screws to secure the perfboard in place.

Then secure the top part of the pedal’s chassis to the bottom half. Plug your distortion pedal into the wall and test it out. If you plug the pedal in and the LCD doesn’t light up when you turn the pedal on then you’ll need to check your connections. If the light does come on and no sound comes out of your amp or the sound cuts in and out with you guitar plugged into the pedal you’ll need to take the pedal apart and ensure that everything is correctly connected.

So long as you have experience with a soldering iron, building a distortion pedal from a kit is a rather straightforward process that will give you the experience and confidence you’ll need to start building more complex circuits.

REPLACE YOUR GUITAR AMP’S FAULTY INPUT JACK

Your guitar amplifier is useless if its input jack is faulty: either your signal is unable to pass through the jack or it’s distorted dramatically (and not the good kind of distortion). Given the time, effort, and materials needed to diagnose and repair a faulty input jack, you’re better off simply replacing the jack altogether. And you don’t need an extensive knowledge of guitar amps to do this simple repair. What you’ll need are a mono input jack, a soldering iron, and solder made for electronics — not to mention experience with soldering.

1. Plug in your soldering iron or fire up your soldering station and give it a few minutes to warm up.
2. Unless you have an open-back amp you’ll need to remove the amp’s panel to access the electronics inside.
3. Unscrew the nut securing the jack to the panel. There will be two wires connected to the jack: the hot wire is the wire connected to the prong touching the input jack’s metal ring; and the ground wire is the wire connected to the prong touching the plastic ring.
4. Melt the solder connecting the wires to the faulty input jack by touching each solder joint with the tip of your soldering iron and then discard the faulty jack.
5. Lightly touch the soldering iron’s tip to your fresh solder to melt a drop on the tip. (You can use traditional leaded or lead-free solder; it doesn’t matter aside from the temperature you’ll use for your soldering iron. However, you should only use solder marked for use with electronics as other types of solder can corrode and damage your amp’s electronics.)
6. Touch the end of the hot wire to the replacement input jack’s prong connected to the metal ring.
7. Touch the drop of molten solder to the point where the input jack’s prong and the wire are touching. Once the heat from the soldering iron is removed the solder will harden rapidly and this will securely connect the wire and input jack.
8. Follow the same procedure outlined in the previous three steps to connect the ground wire to the prong connected to the plastic ring.
9. Insert the end of your replacement input jack in the hole left by the faulty jack. Secure your new input jack with the nut you removed from the faulty jack earlier.
10. If you needed to remove the guitar amp’s panel, replace the panel. (A final note: Your soldering iron will retain heat for several minutes after being unplugged, so it’s a good idea to wait at least fifteen minutes in order to give it time to cool down.)

TROUBLESHOOTING YOUR GUITAR’S VOLUME CONTROL

Your electric guitar’s volume and tone controls are a fast, convenient way to raise and lower your guitar’s bass, mid, treble, and output volume without having to make adjustments at the amplifier; this is extremely helpful when practicing and performing, enabling you to tweak your tone and volume in the middle of a song.

When your guitar’s volume control fails the wires and connections need to be inspected. You’ll want to use your digital multimeter (DMM) to measure the resistance in ohms of the volume potentiometer. Potentiometers, or pots, are the electronic components to which the guitar’s volume and tone knobs attach. The problem with your volume control can be easily isolated and repaired with this simple three-step troubleshooting guide.

(Note: You’ll need a digital multimeter and small Phillips-head screwdriver. Ensure that your guitar is not plugged in to anything while testing your volume controls and, if you have any active electronics, remove their batteries.)

Step One

Remove all plates, knobs, and pickguards preventing access to your guitar’s electronics. Gibson-style guitars usually have a plate on the back of the body that covers the guitar’s electronics. Fender-style guitars, on the other hand, are generally accessed from the front, requiring you to remove the pickguard and the knobs attached to the potentiometers.

Step Two

Check the volume control pot’s wires and connections for any loose soldering or shorts. A loose or broken connection might be the source of the problem and this can be easily fixed by resoldering the connection with your soldering iron.

Step Three

Next you’ll want to test the volume pot using your digital multimeter. Set the DMM’s meter dial to 200k on the ohm (Ω) section of the dial and then turn the guitar’s volume control all the way in one direction. Touch the digital multimeter’s probes to the middle terminal and one of the outside terminals (potentiometers have three terminals). After that turn the volume control in the opposite direction. Depending on the direction the knob is turned the reading on your DMM will increase or decrease. If the reading on your DMM doesn’t change or even show up you’ll know the volume pot is no longer functional and will need to be replaced. The good news is that volume pots are inexpensive and need simply to be soldered.

CLEANING AND MAINTAINING YOUR SOLDERING IRON

Properly caring for your soldering iron will result in lower melt times, cleaner soldering jobs, and a significantly longer iron life. Cleaning and taking care of your soldering iron is rather easy and you’ll only need everyday household items.

Cleaning Supplies

The first thing you’ll need is a sponge, due to its ability to hold water. When you rub a hot soldering iron tip on a wet sponge the solder contracts at a different rate than the soldering iron, which helps to knock off any residual solder clinging to the iron’s tip. (This is why soldering stations include a sponge.) The sponge should be damp — not soaked.

The next thing you’ll need is six hundred-grit sandpaper, which you’ll use on the tip only if it’s been abused by the previous technician, student, co-worker, etc. Paper will catch fire at around four hundred fifty degrees, so be sure that the soldering iron has had time to cool and make sure the soldering iron or station is unplugged.

Tip tinner/cleaner isn't necessary if you have some extra solder, but it may be worth buying and using if you have a high-dollar soldering iron or station. Most of the time solder will work just as well, though.

Two Cleaning Scenarios

Let’s say someone has left you with a cold and dirty soldering iron, which is of course a common scenario in college electronics labs and a lot of workplaces. If and only if the iron is cool lightly scuff the iron’s tip with your six hundred-grit (or higher) sandpaper until the tip regains its luster — you’re just trying to remove the oxidation, not the metal.

If your soldering iron is dirty but still hot, you’ll need to set your iron aside and allow it to heat — a minute and a half is generally sufficient. Once the iron has heated you’ll notice brown deposits on the tip: this is rosin. Take your iron and flick the tip against the damp sponge. Don’t hold the sponge in your hand.

You’re almost finished.

Tip Tinning

Once you've cleaned the iron it’s a good idea to tin the soldering iron’s tip, which you’ll do in our case by lightly coating the entire iron’s tip with solder. The solder will act as a buffer zone that serves to protect the iron from oxidation.

Choose a low-temperature solder so that the iron cools fairly quickly — that way you won’t fry the solder to the tip, which would completely defeat the purpose of cleaning your soldering iron or soldering station. I won’t go into details regarding tinning here, but you’ll find a number of helpful tutorials elsewhere online.

Take care of your soldering iron or soldering station and it will work flawlessly for years to come.

THE ROBOTS ARE COMING — FOR YOUR GUITAR

It’s tedious to tune up your guitar before you play, to tune between songs, and to retune to, say, drop D for one song — only to retune again after the song is over a couple minutes later. If you’re playing in a band you have to make sure that everyone is tuned to exactly the same notes, which gets trickier when you add certain instruments to the mix (e.g., mixing equally tempered instruments with ones that are stretch-tuned).

If you like lighter strings or are a heavy-handed player or, worse yet, if you’re a heavy-handed player who likes lighter strings, you’ll know how quickly and unexpectedly your guitar can go out of tune. A perfect take in the studio amounts to nothing if you’re not in tune. And nothing is as irritating as going out of tune in the middle of a song.

If you have multiple guitars, electric and acoustic, chances are you have multiple tuners, perhaps a clip-on tuner for your acoustic and a pedal tuner on your board for you electric guitar, and maybe you still have that cheapo tuner you got when you bought first guitar. Maybe you even have a high-dollar strobe tuner for setting your intonation. Good pedal tuners are around a hundred bucks, and there are plenty that cost more than that. And heaven help you if you’re searching for that elusive perfectly accurate tuner pedal that doesn't color your tone and has a display that’s easy to read in low light or if you have bad G.A.S. Not only do you have to pay for the tuners themselves, but you've got to shell out for batteries, patch cables, replacement switches, etc.

You get the picture. Tuners are kind of a giant pain in the you-know-what.

Imagine being able to switch from standard tuning to open G to DADGAD in a matter of seconds. Think about how much time you spend tuning when you could be playing. Those times when your guitar goes out of tune in the middle of a song.... What if you could roll off your volume pot, strum all six strings at once, turn your volume back up, and launch into the solo in the middle of a gig?

Self-tuning “robot” tuners have been around for a few years. Maybe you've seen Gibson’s Robot Guitar or their other high-end guitars (e.g., the Dusk Tiger) with robotic tuners built into the back of the headstock, or maybe you've seen Jimmy Page’s Les Paul Goldtop with the costly Transperformance robotic tuning system, which requires heavily modifying your guitar. Soon enough robotic tuners are going to be available on the mass market, and you’ll be able to retrofit practically any guitar.

The catch is that they’re probably going to be expensive.

You don’t have to wait, though, and you don’t have to pay a premium. Students and do-it-yourselfers have been building robotic guitar tuners for years now, using affordable stepper motors and various components you can get from an electronics parts supplier. If you've got chops with a soldering iron, why not give it a shot yourself?

Replacing Your Guitar’s Tone Pot

A common issue electric guitarists face is a tone potentiometer (hereafter tone pot) that, when turned, makes scratching and hissing noisesl. You should first try to clean a problematic tone pot with contact cleaner and, if that doesn’t fix the problem, chances are you have a bad tone pot that needs to be replaced.

Tone pots fine-tune your guitar’s tone by sharpening or deadening the output signal and over time wear, tear, and corrosion can damage the pot’s contacts, causing it to malfunction (i.e. causing scratching or other unwanted noises). On the bright side, replacing your tone pot is quite easy and straightforward, requiring only around fifteen minutes with your soldering iron or soldering station.

Step One

Disconnect your guitar from your amplifier and remove the cable. If your guitar has any active components, remove the batteries. You should never work on your electric guitar when the instrument is powered on because it can damage or ruin the guitar’s components. Remove the screws holding on the guitar’s back plate and then remove the plate.

Step Two

Remove the tone pot’s knob. Loosen the tone pot’s retaining nut with an adjustable wrench and unscrew the nut by hand, removing the nut and lock washer.

Step Three

Remove the tone pot from the guitar. Use a small piece of masking tape to protect each wire leading from the pot. It’s a good idea to write where each wire is soldered to the tone pot on these pieces of tape.

Step Four

Use wire cutters to cut the wire as close as possible to the old tone pot’s pins and remove the pot. Strip insulation from the end of each wire, twist the wire ends, and wrap them around the new tone pot’s pins using the notes you wrote on the masking tape in the previous step.

Step Five

Use your soldering iron or soldering station to solder the wires to the new tone pot’s pins, making sure to let the solder cool completely. Insert the new pot into your guitar and make sure your pot’s post fits and sits correctly and comes out the front of the guitar at the right angle.

Step Six

Next you’ll place the lock washer and retaining on the tone pot’s post’s threads and tighten the nut by hand. Finish by tightening the nut with the adjustable wrench.

Step Seven

Replace the knob on the tone pot’s post and secure the back plate back on the guitar and test out your new, noise-free tone pot.

Stompbox Design with Solderless Breadboards

Let’s say you’ve come up with a novel new circuit for the next Tubescreamer, Ibanez AD-80 delay, etc. that you just know guitarists around the globe will be lining up for one day. You thoughtfully and carefully design your pedal, build it with the finest NOS components from some abandoned Soviet warehouse, meticulously solder your circuit with your high-dollar solder iron or soldering station, and you fire it up for the first time . . . and it doesn’t work, or it doesn’t sound quite how you expected it to.

That’s why solderless breadboards (henceforward called SoBs) are invaluable to stompbox builders: they allow you to quickly and easily design, tweak, and test a circuit without committing to a permanent, finalized design. SoBs come in barebones versions as well as more complex units with built-in power supplies and digital multimeters and mounting brackets and the kitchen sink.

How SoBs Work

Each hole in the SoB’s plastic rail contains a spring-loaded contact that grips the inserted component’s lead while letting you easily remove it. Each column of five holes is internally connected. You can test this by inserting short lengths of 22 or 24 AWG wire into any two holes in a column and measuring between the wires with your digital multimeter in the continuity position (or the lowest resistance scale if your DMM doesn’t have the continuity position).

SoBs have busses, which are a row of horizontally-connected holes that provide a common ground and allow you to distribute power to the necessary points in the circuit. Some SoBs have busses that are connected all the way across, while other are split in the middle — meaning you’ll have to connect the halves for full-length continuity.

If you’re a stompbox builder, do yourself a favor and get yourself an SoB; in addition to being reusable, they’ll really speed up stompbox circuit design, testing, and tweaking before you put time and money and elbow grease into your prototype pedal.

Preparing to Solder

Soldering is a tool that is used by professionals and hobbyists alike. It is defined as joining metals by fusing the alloys which have low melting points. This type of skill is often used in electrical and electronic work, it is a skill that is easy to practice and is very useful. Use the following tips to prepare yourself for soldering.

Before you begin soldering it is important to “tin” the tip of the soldering iron. This is coating the soldering iron tip with a coat of solder to aid in heat transfer. Next will be time to warm up the soldering iron. Make sure the iron heats up completely, this is very important with new soldering irons, since there may be a layer of coating on the tip to prevent corrosion.

The next step is to have an open, clutter free work area. It is important to have proper air flow, no loose clothing on, and a moistened sponge for cleaning the soldering tip. Now you will want to coat the tip in solder, making sure to coat the entire tip. Keep in mind you will be using a good amount of solder so keep more close and handy. Once the soldering tip has been coated with solder wipe the tip with the wet sponge to remove any flux residue. This is best done quickly so the residue has no time to harden and stick to the solder tip.

Tinning must be done every time the soldering iron tip is changed or a new one is being used. This will make it easier for heat to transfer from the iron to the solder. Soldering will go quicker and you will be much more precise.