Tools for Restoring Vintage Electronics

Video Transcript

I'm Larin Parker for Expert Village! We're talking about the basic tools necessary for maintaining and checking out audio gear that's misbehaving or perhaps is in need of service. One possibility that you might need is you might need to re-solder some connections that went bad. This is some what we call sixty forty solder, it's sixty percent ten and forty percent lead I believe. You can also get lead free solders. Trick is the thinner it is usually the better it is for working with small circuits. The thick stuff is more for wiring your house and you want to make that when dealing with electronics you get flux core solder not acid core solder. Flux core is for electronics, acid core is for plumbing. The do not work in the opposite situation. Then here is just a portable soldering iron that I use. I recommend going with a brand name on one of these, just the kind you plug into the wall and keeps about thirty or forty watts on it is perfectly fine. Don't need to have the fancy features. The really cheap ones for five bucks tend to break. I often find myself using alligator clips these are very useful to diagnose which part of the circuit needs some help, you can connect things up in different arrangements and reconnect things. Here I have my trusty screwdriver which I'm going to use to open virtually everything and sometimes make some adjustments of little parts. I recommend having both a flat head and the Phillips head, and it's a good idea to have a number of different sizes. Finally you need some wire cutters and some wire strippers. This will do both, cuts wire down at the joint right here, and then in this little nick right here, I can cut the insulation only and pull the insulation off of insulated wire so that I can re-solder it. Those are the basic tools that I use to do my primary diagnostic and just basic cleaning and maintenance of these instruments.

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