Lawd help me, I’m about to throw my batteries and soldering irons at a wall here. It’s my third solder iron upgrade, thinking I finally have the heat output to get nice wetting action to solder 10AWG wires with themselves and 5.5mm bullet connectors but somehow I’m still only getting cold joints. I’m using this, 1000 F (540 C) peak temperature and a 1/4 inch pyramid tip and I’m not getting any better results than what I got with my first cheap soldering pen.
I have 60/40 and 63/37 rosin-core lead solders, use rosin flux, clean my tips with the steel wool ball thingy, tin my tip, and hold it flat against the wire/connector surfaces and try to let it heat them up. I wait and wait and test the solder and get the cold joint. I’ve watched every legitimate looking YouTube video I can find about soldering but the majority use small wire gauges which are so easy in comparison.
Is there some secret technique others know about because I’ve searched this topic and people have posted about being able to do it with comparable soldering guns. My last resort is to just get a butane torch and go ham.
Everything I read online has people using chisel tips for low ga wire soldering. This is very relevant to some of the stuff I’ll be working on soon, which will involve 8ga wire soldering.
I twist / rotate the tip during apply to let it pour through the cable. Well my skills still suck but it does the job. I only have a 450-500 max degrees at the tip. A large tip is better at soldering big wires, thin tip for PCBs.
And you’d be surprised by how good a simple pocket paper is good at cleaning tips.
Humble advices here as many people do solder wayyyyy better than I do. I’d take gladly some secrets to improve the soldering.
I’ve tried pre-tinning both connections, just one connection, and neither. The issue I have with pre-tinning the wire for the bullet connector is that it gets too bulky to fit it inside the bullet cup, so usually I just tin the bullet cup then put bare wire into it (the wire’s strands are supposedly pre-tinned anyways). But I can never seem to get enough heat to wet the wire though, no matter which method I try.
technically I think 10awg is too large for 5.5mm bullets anyway, but I just cut away some of the tinned wire to shape it into place. one of these is extremely helpful
I agree with this guy here. 10 AWG is way too big to not pre solder. When I was using 5.5 S, I would do exactly what he said. Get the wire nice and wet then trim away a little so that it fits and fill the rest of the bullet with solder. It took me a long time to realize what people meant when they said flow in terms of soldering, but it’s exactly that. LOL I’ve definitely been in your shoes though. Truth be told, the trick to soldering is to buy more wire than you think you would need and more bullet connectors than you think you would need and learn from the fuk UPS!!
Bottom line, my suggestion is to pre tin both, get the bullets nice and hot so that all the solder is liquid, then gradually work your trimmed pre tinned wire in, and then add more solder until it’s almost going to overflow
If your pre-tinned wires get too big, then you’re putting you much solder on the wire. When I pre tin my wires, they’re practically the same size as not pre tinned. I use just enough for the solder to get absorbed in between the strands of the wire.and the outside just lightly coated where you can still see the strands of the wire.
Are you fluxing the tip, or the wire? Also I’ve found that a good way to pre tin large wires is to just strip a tiny bit (like, 1-2mm) and flux/heat/tin the end that sticks out. The insulation holds the strands together so it’ll still fit. Once it’s tinned and cooled down, you can strip the insulation back the proper distance, and solder away.
Putting a little extra solder on the iron tip can help make good thermal contact as well.
HEre’s what i do when i need a butt-joint on 10 awg superworm, which is a high strand count silicone wire that rather enjoys solder flow.
strip about 1/4 inch off of each wire
mesh the the ends together by pressing the stripped ends of the wires into each other until the strands are intermingled and it looks sort of like a single peice of wire that you stripped a chunk out of the middle of. At 10 awg, it should just hold itself together like that long enough to solder. It works on 12 and 14, and 16 as well.
drip flux onto that meshing of wire. Watch is soak in. Drip a few more drops and make sure its all wet and saoking in.
grab your iron and put a nice wet ball of solder on the edge of the tip.
ease that molten ball of lead on the tip of your iron down onto the flux-wetted mesh and watch it begin to flow into the wire.
now slip the heat shrink over the joint. You know, that heat shrink that you were supposed to put on the wire BEFORE you solder the joint? YEah i didn’t do it either. FUCK. Now yell a lot of clever swear combos and throw something, and then undo and redo it to put the tube on so you can shrink it over the joint.
It would never work for me either. I end up using a 135w soldering iron with a blow torch function. I then dipped each wire in flux and tinned them individually, then I put loads of solder on one wire, sat the other on top, then torched until the top aank into the bottom.
Twisting both into each other would never worked, no matter what i tried.
I dont understand why either, maybe soldering irons rating are all marketing.
The blow torch one i use cant even solder them, with any sizeed bit, with any solder and any flux lol. I do melt solder on the tip to help with heat transfer too. Its annoying. I only ever manage big guage stuck with a flame.
i use 14 gauge silicone and 4mm bullets but should still help…
