I AM THE SOLDERING KING

In high school, Jeff was my only classmate who knew how to solder. What little I know today about soldering I learned from looking over his shoulder, and talking to my dad, who used to do electronic repair in the Air Force.

I cut my soldering teeth while attaching modchips to PlayStations back in the late 90s. The earliest modchips only required four wires to be soldered to the console’s motherboard, and the contact points were large and isolated from other components. I can’t imagine anything easier to work on. By the time the PlayStation 2 was released, modchips required 30 wires to be soldered to teeny tiny spots all over the place, and I was out.

I have two or three soldering irons out in the garage and they are all junk. The handle on one is broken. The other one takes ten minutes to warm up. I haven’t done much soldering lately so it hasn’t been an issue, but recently I’ve had a couple of projects pop up that needed some work done. My friend Delf graciously lent a hand repairing my MiST when it needed some solder work, but I really want to be able to fix some of these things on my own in the future, so for my birthday this year, I asked for a small soldering station. I got one.

There are probably better ones out there, but I know for a fact there are worse ones because I own them. This soldering station heats up in seconds and has everything I need.

The first project I’ve had sitting around for years is this joystick.

This Kraft joystick is the one I used on my Commodore 64 for almost a decade back in the 1980s. I don’t mean I used one like this one, I mean this is the one I used. Much to my dismay, years ago the “up” direction quit working. I assumed (correctly) that one of the wires inside had broken or fallen off. This seemed like a simple project and a good way to test out the new soldering iron.

After removing two screws, I confirmed what I had suspected. That little wire I’m holding is supposed to connect to that contact point. As you can see… it doesn’t.

I didn’t know what temperature to use so, like our toaster, I just pressed the middle setting and hoped for the best. The middle setting turned out to be 680 degrees, and the soldering iron took only a few seconds to warm up to that temperature. There was enough solder left on the contact that all I had to do was heat it up and reconnect the wire.

Success! A quick round of Impossible Mission confirmed that the joystick works just as good as it used to.

Now, what else needs repairing around here…