[jacquesm]

Apart from the dead dogs my experience in a first world country was quite similar. But for some reason I'm more impressed with you, probably because here in NL electronics were relatively easy to come by because people were throwing away older generating electronics with great regularity to buy something newer.

Whereas I would expect that in the 3rd world by the time you got your fingers on it it must have been technically beyond salvage.

Crystal radios are neat!

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Thank you. I found the same to be true, though. Most people don't know how to repair radios, or don't know anyone who can do it, so if it's anything more complex than a broken wire, it ended up in the trash. At least the cheap, handheld transistor radios did. Happily, everything was through-hole in the 70's so parts were easy to remove :-)

[jacquesm]

Yes, thank god for through hole parts, otherwise I don't think I ever would have made it this far. VLSI is killing poor kids' ability to get started with electronics.

What did you do your soldering with?

My first soldering iron(s) were simply screwdrivers in the stove :)

I even recycled the solder but it took a while to understand that you need flux as well as solder to make a good joint.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I don't think heating up a screwdriver ever occurred to me!

My first soldering iron was huge! I don't remember who gave it to me, but it was clearly not for electronics. It had a small wooden handle and a tip that looked like a large, bent flathead screwdriver. It could remove parts, but not much else. Ha! gotta love google. It looked something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Soldering-Handle-Chisel-Point-Copper/...

Thinking back, my grandfather was a carpenter and left a shop full of tools when he died, so it's possible that it used to be his.

I remember asking for a real soldering iron as a Christmas or birthday present and getting a low-wattage one since they didn't cost that much. Until then, everything was held together by wrapping wire onto leads.

The strange thing is that I remember having a small soldering iron, but I don't remember ever having actual solder.

[jacquesm]

Interesting thread this. You made me re-live a whole bunch of my past and I noticed something funny (or at least, I think it is funny): to this day I can't help myself, when I walk by a dumpster or the garbage before it is picked up I am still scanning for TVs, tape recorders etc. It's so automatic that if not for this thread I would not have caught on to what that was all about, it's simply a habit.

And I still can't stand waste.

One day we will look back to this age and wonder: how on earth could we have been so wasteful that perfectly good stuff ended up in a landfill.

That soldering iron of yours looks like the perfect tool for some SMD work.

I recall those in the hands of stained glass workers, either that or gas heated ones.

My first upgrade from a screwdriver looked like this:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/pEUAAOSw621hLQqd/s-l1600.jpg

Which actually worked well enough for tube based electronics, (not even hole through, just built up in the air on metal frames). And it held the heat a lot longer than the screwdrivers, which tended to carbonize after a while.

[dhosek]

A lot of functional electronics end up in third world countries as "e-waste." Never underestimate the wastefulness of American consumers.