Christopher Kiefer well said

Yes!

good call on the cinematography. Wouldn't have thought of that but yeah, Colin's the Speilberg of geek vids

I get the vibe of Alton Brown’s Good Eats show.

@@michaelcoxjr Me too, plus a little bit of Thomas Dolby! :-)

That guy cracks me up

Instructive too.

Yeah, he's amusing!

Well, they come with that tip from the manufacturer, it's not the distributor's fault.

Ben Shamsian

+Jesse Leonard Those catalogs are like a mail-order treasure hunt. They won't even send you one willy-nilly, NOOOO, you have to ascend to the customer level worthy of being bestowed such a gift. I remember Will and Norm from tested.com and Adam Savage from Mythbusters talking about it on their podcast a long time ago as well.

I'd argue that for anyone who is looking to do electronics at today's scale, including surface mount components, Hakko's FX888 is about as cheap as you'd want to go, and an excellent choice no one will regret. It's about $100-$110, which I would not call extremely expensive. The cost is comparable to that of any decent power tool, like say a Makita 18V drill. Hakko has $2500 soldering irons for people who do this for a living. The soldering iron is your main tool as an electronics hobbyist, cheaping out on it will affect absolutely everything you build or repair. Trying to do everything with a single 25W mains-plug iron is, IMO, a mistake of false economy; you'll lose the difference in cost over your first couple of weeks, as ruined boards and components, wasted solder, and by spending 5 times as much time fixing and debugging your bodge jobs than if you had a good tool. When I was a kid, I could get by with one 25W Radio Shack pencil iron too, but those were the days of discrete, through-hole components only. I can't say that I'd want to use that today on something like a microcontroller or TSOP IC. And on that note, a lot of people are going to find out pretty quickly that they need a hot air station too; soldering is not just for irons any more!

"Mr anderson"

Pfft he IS the Matrix.

He sounds more like the narrator from Twilight Zone.

Me sorder

Enjoyed that. Very Educational and sound track is quality :)

And yep - extra flux is definitely recommended, but probably not necessary for a lot of basic through-hole soldering, as long as you use a decent solder with multi-core flux to begin with. But, added flux is pretty much a MUST for a lot of surface-mount stuff, especially when doing drag-soldering on chips with many fine pins. I use often use extra flux for making things like the solder joints on small 0603 / 0402 sized components a lot neater. Many of the cheaper "stripboard" or "matrix boards" with bare copper tend to oxidise too easily as well. You can buy the nice pre-tinned proto boards really cheaply now, so luckily the bare copper boards are a thing of the past for newer prototypes. hehe I find lead-free solder to be OK to work with, as it's used in practically everything these days. It does tend to look slightly dull in comparsion to lead solder, but it doesn't take long to get used to using it. You do need a fairly decent soldering station with a good thermal capacity for lead-free really (due to the higher temps required). Thermal capacity of a soldering iron / station is NOT the same thing as it's rated wattage though. The cheapo irons you often see (usually with the giant screw that holds the tip in. lol) can get way too hot when just sitting "idle", and can have that charred / oxidised look in a very short time. They might claim to be "60 Watts" or "100 Watts", but that doesn't mean they have any kind of temperature control, nor have decent thermal capacity when soldering larger components / PCB planes / heatsinks.