How to practice - starting from virtually 0
Hi everyone,
I have soldered in the past, maybe 5 times, very badly, so I am basically completely inexperienced.
Some context:
I have a very good soldering iron, flux, desoldering wick.
My main target/hope is to become good enough at soldering so I can solder my hobby electronics projects on perfboard, build and assemble a drone, repair my electronics, that kind of stuff.
I've been doing a couple of practice kits (astable multivibrator, christmas tree with leds, that kind of stuff) and they went OK, they don't look good but they work.
I have consumed much, much, much well reviewed youtube content about soldering. I felt prepared
What I tried:
I have a project that works on the breadboard, it includes a raspberry pico, a waveshare eink display, some transistors, leds and resistors. I felt ready to solder it , had a plan, wiring diagram:
- Step 1: solder a 40 pin GPIO header on the perfboard - worked ok
- Step 2: solder pico female headers on the perfboard - worked ok
- Step 3 start connecting wires from the 40 pin GPIO header to the pico ...
I completely failed at this step, broke down at the first wire.
- I tried to make a solder bridge from the header to the unstripped part of the wire .. failed
- I used the wick to remove most of the solder and tried to solder the wire directly to the very small pin of the female headers. Horrible failure, I can get the wire stuck to the pin, but as soon as I come in to add more solder, I melt everything and the wire falls off.
- I repeated the above 2 attempts many times
I tinned the header first, I tinned the wire, didn't help. I used a 1.6 mm chisel tip for this.
Everytime I tried something, I ended up creating a bigger and bigger blob around my work area. I would then wick it away, try again, same result.
So obviously I am very bad at this and need more practice. I cannot try to solder my project because I will have more failures along the way, I am sure.
Thank you for reading all this way, the subject of the post follows only now:
So how do I train? I will do more practice kits, I have a few of them, they will help but they are all for through hole or smd components.
I seem to fail miserably at point to point connections.
Should I just take a lot of wire, a perfboard and do endless connections between wires and headers until I am good at it? Then maybe I can experiment with more methods of holding the wires down in place? maybe tie them to the perfboard with wire-core so that they stay perfectly put?
When I watch youtube videos, it looks like everyhting just falls into place, the author just uses tweezers to lay the wire, touches it with the souldering iron, BOOM, done.
When I do it I lay the wire in place, touch it with the soldering iron and everything moves away, gets stuck to the wrong thing, meanwhile the blob just grows.
Do I just practice for hours on the exact thing I need?
Thank you for reading all this, I appreciate any tips.