How to Solder Stained-Glass Art

Video Transcript

Okay we have got all our pieces cut, they have been wrapped in foil, they have been fluxed, they are laid out in our pattern, I have kind of gotten them as tight as I can. You can see that there is some gaps between some of the piece and that is just a result of inaccuracies when we cut them but the nice thing is that the solder will fill them in and you kind of won’t see it as much when we put it together. So it is important that the pieces lay flat at this stage and so you, even though this piece of paper I’ve got behind here to, so you can see a little bit better, you know the paper might have a little bit of waviness lifting the pieces up so you probably want to do this flat on a piece of wood or something like that, but just so you can see it I kind of have that paper behind just as kind of a background. It will probably be okay. I am going to kind of tighten it up, make sure that I am minimizing the gaps between pieces, make sure that everything is lined up and then I am going to start assembling it. So the way I like to work is to kind of have the thing assembled in front of me and kind of have it tight and then just leave it while I kind of put the whole thing together because if you try to do it piece by piece, like if I were to take this rectangular piece and then solder these two triangles onto it and then kind of try to build it a piece at a time, you sometimes find that if you take that approach that you get to a point where things are a little bit out of alignment and it won’t fit together. So this is why I kind of like to lay it all out, kind of get it as tight as I can, minimize gaps and then start working on it. So here is my soldering iron, it has kind of been resting in my holder, it is nice and hot, the first thing I am going to do is kind of, you know clean off the tip by touching it against the sponge. I’ve got some solder on a spool here, the first thing that I am going to do is tin the tip of my soldering iron just by kind of melting some right onto it and you see it just kind of flowing over the tip, this is called “tinning” the tip, “t” “i” “n” “n” “i” “n” “g”, okay so there we go, I’ve tinned the tip of my iron, oops, I kind of have a little glob there, that is one thing that you can use the sponge for, to get the little globs off, then what I am going to do and I will just do one really quickly here, I am going to hold the iron to the part of the design, let’s say right here and I am heating up the copper foil and then if you just touch the solder to the foil and you know you kind of bring it in close to the iron at the same time it will flow evenly over the foil and over the flux, you can kind of see that starting to happen here a little bit. So I am just kind of going to go over the whole design, heating up the foil, as the foil gets hot I am going to bring the solder in, the solder will melt itself automatically to the foil, you can kind of go along and just, just start connecting it in that way, so I am going to do that a little bit and talk about it more in the next clip.

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