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Questions about soldering.

post #1 of 10
5/26/11 at 4:21pm
Thread Starter 

So today at school my left speaker of my akg k81's went out. I thought it was the headphone jack of my ipod again and so i fiddled around with the connection to see if it was but when i plugged them in onto my phone and listened to music through there, i realized that the connector plug was broken because i was able to pull it at certain directions where i would get sound from the left driver or no sound at all, mostly no sound.

 

I looked stuff up on here about re-plugging the headphone jack and wasn't too interested on getting new cables. I went to my nearest radioshack and bought a soldering iron a 3.5mm gold plated plug and free with the soldering iron was a 60/40 Rosin-Core Solder.

 

My questions are:

 

-Is Rosin-Core Solder a good solder to use when re-plugging in terms of sound quality? I heard that silver is the most popular.

 

-When twisting the two ground wires together, is it required to use the solder iron to melt them together before you actually attach it to the plug?

 

-How are you supposed to "thread" the wires into the holes of the plug, can you simply bend the wire like a hook and insert it from there and then solder it all together from the hole?

 

-I don't have a multimeter because I didn't bring enough money to buy one at radioshack and I have no knowledge of how to use one. So in order to determine which channel is which from left to right, how would I determine this? Should i follow the two cables that are split from the headphones down according from left to right and determine from there?

 

Thank you, any help is appreciated.

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post #2 of 10
5/26/11 at 4:46pm
Rosin core 60/40 is what I use for all of my soldering work. It works well.

I would twist them, then solder them to the joint, rather than soldering them together first. Some may disagree, but if you solder them together first, you're much less likely to make a direct connection at the joint, and instead you may accidentally form a solder gap connection, which is just generally bad.

It depends on the plug. Generally, if you can get a good connection and solder it on, its not something to worry about too much.

You could try following it. Generally a multimeter would be the ideal solution, but I can't think of any other solution you have.
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post #3 of 10
5/26/11 at 5:08pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by revolink24 View Post

Rosin core 60/40 is what I use for all of my soldering work. It works well.

I would twist them, then solder them to the joint, rather than soldering them together first. Some may disagree, but if you solder them together first, you're much less likely to make a direct connection at the joint, and instead you may accidentally form a solder gap connection, which is just generally bad.

It depends on the plug. Generally, if you can get a good connection and solder it on, its not something to worry about too much.

You could try following it. Generally a multimeter would be the ideal solution, but I can't think of any other solution you have.



The k81's wires are a mono so i think i'll be able to follow it down like so. The one I bought isn't the one i'm going to use, I might use it on some spare headphones to practice. I am planning to order a Switchcraft 35HDNN to use for the plug.

 

Is soldering hard at all? It is dangerous afterall.

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post #4 of 10
5/26/11 at 5:20pm
Not terribly. You might want to try soldering a few things together just for practice before you solder the real thing though. There are a lot of good soldering tutorial videos on YouTube if you check them out.

Soldering isn't all that dangerous, just be careful not to burn yourself, that can hurt as most of us in the DIY community know well.
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post #5 of 10
5/26/11 at 7:44pm
Thread Starter 

What could I practice on?
Also, the solder I got is coiled up like a spring, can you bend this straight to make soldering easier?

 

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post #6 of 10
5/26/11 at 8:30pm

Have you read this? http://tangentsoft.net/audio/new-diyer.html

It should answer most of your questions.

 

 

As for bending the solder... I've never seen solder "coiled like a spring"

But you're just going to melt it.. it can be bent switchever way you want.

 

 

I would build a CMOY for practice.

I wouldn't worry about making it "high performance". It's not really worth it in my opinion.

Just good practice.

 

http://tangentsoft.net/audio/cmoy-tutorial/


Edited by nullstring - 5/26/11 at 8:32pm
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post #7 of 10
5/26/11 at 10:13pm
Radio Shack solder comes coiled up in a little 1/2" tube and it looks like a spring. Go ahead and bend it to whatever shape you find best to work with. You're going to melt it, so a little bending doesn't hurt anything.

Skip the silver stuff. I find it more difficult to work with and there are no known sonic benefits.

Also, the wires inside the cord are likely coated with enamel. They might look bare, but you'll find them tough to solder. Nail polish remover or mineral spirits will take the enamel off.
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post #8 of 10
5/27/11 at 12:26am

 

 

TinClean.jpg

 

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2062721

This stuff is great!

 

 

 

Also get these from the super market!

copperpads.jpg

Other tips.

Don't put tap water on the sponge. I have a temp controlled iron so I don't use a sponge. If you are using a standard pencil iron, you will need a wet sponge to cool the tip of the iron every so often. Use a natural sponge and distilled water that you can also get at the supermarket. You can use Dasani bottled water if you don't want to buy a gallon of distilled. Still, it's cheap and it's good to have around.

 

Always keep the tip clean. The scour pad is excellent for that. Then you hit the tip cleaner and your ready to go. Do that often.wink_face.gif

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post #9 of 10
5/29/11 at 2:24pm
The sponge is not there to "cool the iron", rather, it exists as a method to clean the tip. The issue with water and a sponge is that it thermal shocks the tip and tends to wear it down faster. Hence, the brass wool cleaning method, which, cleans the oxide off of the tip without changing the temperature. A win-win situation.

Some would argue that specialized tip cleaner is not necessary as long as the tip is kept cleaned (either via brass wool or the sponge method) and tinned using the solder you are using for the project.
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post #10 of 10
5/29/11 at 11:10pm

Like jdkJake says... I just reapply more solder to tin the tip and use a wet sponge to keep it clean. I've never needed to use a brass wool thingy to keep it clean. My current tip is about 2 years old with a bunch of projects on its belt and it's still going strong.

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