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I also get to fix gear in the middle of nowhere, so I'm sympathetic to that plight.

I used to watch people with fancy-looking soldering irons working quickly on stuff in repair shops. Some of that was technique ("it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools"), but some of it was definitely the irons they were using.

And yet: My first soldering experiences were not very good.

The first soldering irons I had, starting 30 years ago or so, were resolutely terrible. I eventually gained a whole assortment of them -- big, medium, small, and ginormous. They were all awful in their own unique ways, and they all lacked a thermostatic temperature control.

I got better solder (I've become a big fan of Kester 44 in a eutectic 63/37 mix) fairly early on, which helped a ton.

Later, I got better soldering irons.

A dozen years ago I bought a Hakko clone temperature-controlled soldering station from an American distributor. It took genuine Hakko tips just fine, and it was better.

5 or 6 years ago, I got a Pinecil v1. I now own two of them: I bought one as a spare in case one broke somehow (it's hard to fix a soldering iron without a soldering iron), but they've both been reliable. It's miles ahead of what I've used before. The v2 should be a bit better yet, but I do not own one of those. They're rather inexpensive.

These Pinecil irons weren't available a decade ago. I wish they had been.

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Anyway: With the tools decently in-check, my technique got a lot better in a big hurry. I thought I'd learned to be pretty OK at soldering before with my lackluster tools, but the Pinecil iron (and its consistent temperature, sleep modes, and very quick heat-up) helps me get much better results -- faster.

And it's hackable, which (to me) scores some geek points.

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I've come to think that anybody can learn to solder electronics with reasonable proficiency. I've taught people to solder who were sure they couldn't do it, including people who started off by being surprised by how hot the hot-bits are and walking them back from the ledge.

As with many other skills, it mostly just takes practice. But that practice should be inconsequential -- it's a lot easier to learn when the result is completely unimportant and inconsequential than on a dear 40-year-old arcade board.

To that end: There's ridiculously-inexpensive kits these days that primarily exist just to teach soldering. I learned through-hole the old-fashioned way (by failing), but back then cheap kits didn't exist at the level they do today. :)

If you can tell me more about the specific problems you're having with soldering, I can provide links to specific, specific soldering kits that may help.

(I can provide hands-on help, too, if you're not too far away. No big deal.)

[TacticalCoder]

> (I can provide hands-on help, too, if you're not too far away. No big deal.)

Arcade cab would be located in France, on the french riviera, 45 minutes from the closest highway, in a sea-side but rural (lots of vineyards) area.

But I want to thank you very much for the explanation and offer to help!

Nothing in particular: typically it's the wiring around the joysticks and buttons that gives me the most trouble for the wire harness kinda "weighs" on it, then kid play like maniacs, and eventually a solder fails and has to be redone.

Now on the plus side I did buy a chinese JAMMA harness and did manage to solder everything but the result is fuglier than fugly: that's why I say I'm really bad at it. Basically I can do "gross" soldering, but not nice looking, precise ones.

I'll practice a bit though after the kind words from everybody.

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Yeah, France is a little bit out for me. There's quite a big pond between here and there. :)

So... joysticks, and buttons. Don't those have microswitches? With connectors on each switch?

Crimping the correct mating terminals can be more reliable than soldering. (Crimp-on connectors are what keeps airplanes up in the sky.)

Perhaps the right answer to soldering arcade controls is to stop soldering altogether. :)

Solder does have a big advantage, though, in that it is very universal. Any random copper wire can be glued onto any random terminal with molten metal, and that's pretty neat because it doesn't take any specialized parts or tools to make this work.

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Anyway, I promised to help. For that kind of soldering, my usual workflow goes like something like this:

1. Cut off the end of the wire (for nice clean copper) and strip back the insulation a bit.

2. Heat up the iron and prep it (apply solder, wipe it off along with oxides, maybe apply more solder; it should be shiny and wet, but not with globs of stuff on it)

3. Tin the exposed copper wire. Heat it up while applying solder, until the solder flows through the strands freely. Too hot/too long means that a bunch of solder flows down past the insulation, which isn't ideal. Too cold/not long enough means that it kind of globs instead of flows. Perfect is somewhere in the middle. Set it aside to cool down.

4. Tin the terminal. Just heat it up with solder applied, until there's a neat little easily-flowing pool of it, and then let it cool down some. If the solder's flux core starts to burn, you're taking too long. If it blobs, it's not hot enough or not clean enough. Somewhere in the middle is, again, perfect.

5. Stick them together. Place the tinned wire on the tinned terminal so they "want" to rest together naturally (there's jigs that help with this kind of fixturing). And then, heat up the combination of the two with the iron. The solder that's mixed up with the wire will become one with the pool of solder on the terminal, and that's good. Often, there's no additional solder required for this step (but sometimes it's useful to add more). Again: Too hot and the solder flows away and the flux burns. Too cold, and it looks weird and instead of glassy. In the middle is good.

6. Remove heat. Don't move anything but the iron; just let the temperature drop until things turn solid.

Anyway, wire is easy to find. And a bag of cheap switches shouldn't cost too much. :)

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Now, that said: I live in the States, where we never adopted RoHS. It's very simple for me to get solder with lead in it and that's the usual thing to see on any repair bench.

Lead-free solder is relatively unusual, and is not something I care to work with any more than I have to. I do not enjoy encountering it during repairs, mostly because it seems like it takes an astounding amount of heat to get it to do anything but laugh at me.

And really, for occasional hobbyist use, lead isn't a problem: Wash your hands afterwards, keep your work area clean, and don't let kids play with it. :)

What kind of solder are you using?