Soldering help????

Hey everyone,

I am soldering some patch cables together and I keep getting faulty connections, my soldering is clean and neat and yet still bad connections.

I use a temp control solder station and 60/40 solder wire and I cannot see what I am doing wrong.

Can anyone help?

Are you heating the bits you want to solder together before you apply the solder ?

make sure you have some kind of sheild (plastic usually) making sure the exposed center wire isn't touching the ground anywhere. Make sure its bendable too, so when you move it around it doesnt touch anywhere.

I am heating parts before applying solder and the two cables are not touching anywhere together.

I am not using any flux to clean areas I am soldering, will that make a difference?

Also the solder wire I am using is a few years old, its quite a heavy reel would last me years and years for the amount of soldering I do???

Can you describe what a "faulty connection" is? Is the solder balling up instead of flowing out and wetting the metals? This is usually an indication that the metals are either not getting hot enough, or the they aren't clean enough to bond with the solder.

What sort of flux core is in your solder? They usually use letters like "RA", "RMA", "NC", etc. RA is good for especially dirty contacts, but the activated flux will eat up the tip on your iron with regular use. You also have to clean it off the connection when you're done or it will corrode the metals.

What temperature do you have the iron set to? What size is the tip? Larger metal objects needs a larger contact surface area with the soldering iron in order to send heat into the metal faster than the metal is capable of dissipating it. If the iron has a small pointy tip then you want to lay the tip on the metals at an angle to increase the contact surface area. Make sure the tip is clean and tinned with fresh solder so that it's wet.

Old solder will have a oxide coating on the surface which gives it a dull gray appearance. The oxide coating is generally very thin if you're using tin/lead solder. The lead is too dense for the oxygen and moisture to penetrate very deep. The oxides will float to the top of the solder when it's molten, and usually won't have much of an effect on the solder joint. In other words, you should be able to get decent solder joints even if the solder is very old. The only time the oxides become a problem is when your using solder in a pot (like a wave soldering machine).

If the contacts are especially dirty or oxidized then dip them in paste flux before soldering.

The solder is flowing over both contacts and looks good, but once I have screwed up the jack casings I check the lead in a cable tester and I have multiply faults in either or both connections.

I am using Draper solder wire sw3 (60/40 mix),

I have the iron set to 270 deg C.

270 degress celcius is pretty cool. I usually use a 700 degree F. tip for tin/lead solder (about 370C), and 800F for non-lead (427C).

SW3 is Draper's stock number for that particular type of solder wire. I suspect it means "Solder Wire 3". The Draper catalog only lists it as "flux core", along with SW1 and SW2A. Perhaps it applies to the gauge of the solder wire. I don't know.

Just out of curiosity, what does you cable tester say if you plug a commercial patch cable into it? Just wondering if the cable tester is ok.

Anyway, I'd resolder the joints with a hotter iron, to start with. Also, make sure the conductors on the cable are clean. A joint may look good if the solder is wetting the lugs on the plug, even if it isn't wetting the wire inside the solder. Try tinning the cable wires before soldering them to the lugs to make sure they're wetting properly.

After that, check the surface of the plugs themselves. Any dirt on the plug would affect the continuity test.

I use my multi meter to check continuity rather than a cable tester. Also, if you're using Mogami the black stuff that covers the insulator on the center wire is conductive so strip it off the clear stuff a bit to make sure you're not shorting to ground.

First, can I say to everyone who has chimed in here to give some advice, I appreciate it. Thank you.

The cable tester shows other cables to be wired correctly with no faults.

I am gonna go get some flux and new solder wire and have another go today.

I have been tinning the solder tip and job before soldering also, so find the reason for these faults confusing.

I am still having problems with faulty connections I have tried a different soldering iron and solder and I am still having similar faults occuring. Do I need to prepare the jack connection points? Should I polish or score before tinning them?

bump

is the cable your soldering to also old, could that be the problem? Does your cable tester have a way of testing it before the jacks are on? if not a multimeter would work.

Can you post pics of the soldered jacks?

Agreed. Pics would help enormously.

The cable is a few years old, I have had left over from my last lot of soldering. And I am thinking it may be bad cable so;

How would I test it with a multimeter? and what kind of multimeter do I need. I will have to buy one.

Another thing you may want to check that happened to me on my cables- The Jack that I was using (Jumbo Style 1/4") when I would solder the positive tip- I would heat it up and the connection at the tip would break. so I would touch my multimeter to the positive (solder tip) and touch the center or positive end directly underneath it and there was no connection. It was poor design of the tips- You may want to isolate where the signal loss is. Hopefully you will find the problem- Good Luck!

[YOUTUBE]I_NU2ruzyc4[/YOUTUBE]

This video is excellent.

Your has gone way over my head.

I hope someone didn't already say this, but make sure your soldering surfaces are completely clean. I bought some connectors on ebay and I ended up taking the top layer of plating off with a Dremel grinder in order to get the solder to not bead up. No amount of heat would work. They had coated it with something.

you need to concern for some very good electrician so he might be helpful you in that matter.

It was very good...I'm "OK" at soldering things, but this had some basic tips that I had completely forgotten about! Just in time for me to solder my Neutrik jacks.

Sort of off and on topic but does anyone know if you would be able to solder the Planet Waves cables to a Neutrik jack...since the Planet Waves are "solder-less cables". I don't see a ground wire inside.

Yep, that sort of thing does happen. Might be why they were selling the connectors on eBay.

When Bourns first introduced their guitar series pots somebody on their production line messed up, and they built the pots using galvanized cans instead of regular steel. Apparently, nobody told the guy on the production line that people would actually be soldering wires to the pot can. I ended up getting some of those pots from Mouser. It was possible to grind off the zinc plating with a dremel and get solder to stick to them, but I was still ticked off and wrote an email to Bourns. They were already aware of the problem, and had already corrected it. Apparently, Mouser was supposed to have returned the pots to Bourns, but they didn't.

Anyway, the applications engineer at Bourns sent me a bag of new pots, some Bourns guitar picks, and a nice big Bourns coffee cup!

Yeah the plugs do need a bit of heat to get the solder to flow on to , I am gonna try scratching down the points and cleaning with flux before I have another go.

I want to check the cable with a Multimeter also, can you someone explain how I would do this please?

Thanks

Connect one meter lead to one end of the cable, and the other meter lead to the other end. Start by measuring from one end of the center conductor to the other, then try measuring from one end of the shield to the other. You should measure zero ohms in each case. Also, try measuring from center conductor to shield. You should measure infinite ohms. If it passes those tests, then your cable is probably fine.

You could also measure the capacitance of the cable, but most multimeters aren't accurate with capacitance values that low. You'd need more sensitive test gear, like a capacitance bridge.