when soldering irons go bad

On Thu, 28 May 2009, Dave McGuire wrote: Go to the flea market (boot sale) and buy a bunch of extremely cheap Wellers with broken switches and broken connections where the wire to the iron connects with the base. They'll cost you the same as the disposables. You might need to borrow a real iron to repair one of them, and then you can use that to repair the others. Then you will have a supply of adequate quality irons. Once I had iron(s), I felt a need to improve my soldering. I bought a few BARE XT mother boards, BARE video boards, and BARE floppy controllers, and a LOT of Augat turned pin sockets. They were readily available, and a LOT cheaper in those days. The cheapest sockets were soldered to various boards, so I also got a chance to learn UNsoldering. By the time I had populated the boards, the quality of my soldering had improved to "marginal". Most of the machines worked on the first try! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com