Yeah looks fine though. Kapton tape works well.
Hot air and flux are my goto like you discovered. I will only use a soldering iron when I really have to get something small and targeted off, like one capacitor or so.
Discussion
Yeah so true 100% agreed. I feel like I've been living in the dark ages for so many years until tonight.
Well best of luck! I was thinking for the holiday issue of somehow including a small soldering kit actually. Like a fm radio kit.
Maybe I'll look into that more.
Definitely!! What about a crystal radio? Or is that lame? I am shaming myself but I've never built one.
Over at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Wizards (Soldersmoke Podcast) there is a regenerative receiver kit project from a few years back the hosts have talked about sometimes that I think would be a fun build. Kind of complicated though maybe.
Still, I recognize it is not called the bitpunk[ . ]am podcast so perhaps frequency modulation radio kits are the one true path. I'm down either way. If you want to research and plan a build would be happy to help. Not sure if you already have something in mind.
Went back and looked up a bunch of FM, AM,and then combo kits. So much out there I guess the question could be what is the point, meaning, soldering lesson, building something around minimal analogue components, quick build, high quality-ish (with cheap parts) build, or maybe some other goal? What are your thoughts?
I think it would be fun! The kits I ordered (not yet received) are a FM transmitter with no crystal. So its kinda mind blown how it works with a single transistor.
It both demystifies and adds more layers to radio I think.
But mainly the fun. On the tape, I would walk through the soldering steps so it would be a solder-a-long.
Awesome (hopefully) sub-$10/kits...surely all things now reside inside of a Si5153 maybe thats too dark. Regardless will be fun as hell