[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.