Prolonging the Life of Your Soldering Equipment

Keeping your soldering tip in top condition is crucial. A clean tip means more efficient, more accurate, and longer lasting work. Moreover, having a well-maintained iron gives you the most out of your soldering investment. To ensure your unit stands the tests of time and industrial use, we've gathered these helpful tips for keeping your soldering tips, especially premium tips from Hexacon™, in prime working condition.

Frist and foremost, manufacturers recommend that you keep the working surface of your soldering tip tinned. If you leave your solder idle for extended periods, be sure to keep excess solder on the tip.

Keep your solder tip clean. When burned solder or flux residue accumulates, wipe it off with a wet cellulose sponge. For soiled tips, allow the unit to cool before cleaning with a scrubber. Heating the tip just enough to melt resin and solder with flux core solder as soon as possible is best.

Finally, be certain you always adhere to good soldering practices. This includes removing the tip often to prevent sticking as well as keeping the tip fully inserted in the iron at all times is. In doing so, you ensure quality results as well as extended the usage potential of your scolding equipment.

Choosing Lead-Free Soldering

Controlling hazardous substances, like lead, cadmium, and mercury, is essential to improving the products we create. It is valuable to our industry's end users, resell outlets, and manufacturers. The choice has also faced some heavy criticism in the past decade. These criticisms are mostly in response to the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS), which was adopted by the European Union in 2003 and enacted in 2006.

The RoHS directive saw feedback that sited increased production costs, difficulties with superheated materials, and overall reliability. While these thoughts were valid, the change has not affected the industry as harshly as manufactures predicted in 2005. Most notably, product reliability has increased. Moreover, solder reliability has increased while component sizes have decreased.

Lead-free solder helps manufacturers dramatically reduce component sizes. This is because lead-free solder does not wet well, allowing producers to print leads closer together. In fact, experiments with lead-based and lead-free leads found fewer shortages and other problems with lead-free solder.

When you add in the 20% lead, 63% cadmium, 56% mercury, and 68% Octa-BDE reduction the European industry has seen in the first three years, you see the benefits of lead-free solder outweigh the costs by far.