How to Use a Soldering Iron in Stained-Glass Projects

Video Transcript

Okay, so let's talk about the soldering iron, why do you need a soldering iron? Because what a soldering iron does, is is a very hot tool and it actually can be very dangerous for that reason. So I want to talk about kind of soldering safety, but what it does, is it is able to melt a metal with a low melting point such as the solder that you will be using and its uses. It does that to bind together either the joints for pieces of lead cane if you are using the lead cane method of making a stained glass panel or project or alternatively for the using the copper foil method. You have to coat the copper foil with a liquid flux and then the solder will join those pieces of copper foil together and because the glass is embedded in the foil so now the glass is stuck together too and we will go through all of that. But that is what the soldering iron is for, it heats up solder so that you can either solder joints in lead cane or you can solder pieces of copper foil wrapped glass together. There are all kinds of soldering irons you can get. One thing about soldering irons is that they can get, they can get very, very hot, obviously they need to but some soldering irons get hotter than you might want them to get for stained glass. You don't want soldering, a soldering iron to get so hot that it instantly melts the solder when it touches it. You want it to have sort of, slightly gradual kind of melting process where it kind of maybe takes just a few seconds maybe to melt that solder. So the point I am getting to is, soldering irons that plug straight into the wall, you don't have a lot of control over the temperature but if you can buy or get one of these soldering iron control kind of boxes, you see this has my soldering iron plugged in right into it and I have a full range of numbers from you know off, all the way up to ten and I can set this kind of where ever I want, and so. So if I find that my soldering iron is too hot plugged straight into the wall I can turn it down and for my particular soldering iron that I have, I have this set at around eight and a half but that is just something that you can experiment with and play with. So it is good to have soldering iron control, it is good to have a stand for your soldering iron, that is kind of what I have got here. I will turn it around so that you can see it, it's you see it is very hot, this is a nice stand, it is keeping my soldering iron safe, kind of away from the table where it could burn my wood table or away from me where it could burn me. You see it has a sponge underneath it, a wet sponge that you kind of use to kind of clean the tip right, and so it is also kind of nice that when you get a soldering iron to have a stand and to keep it safe and kind of you know internal sponge to clean it off. Although there are other kinds of stands and systems that are not quite this complex but it is nice to have heat control, it's nice to have the stand, a sponge to clean it off and so in the next clip I am going to tell you a little bit about the tip of the soldering iron.

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