At 12:44 AM 8/29/99 +1200, you wrote: >Someone mentioned a special tip for soldering surface mount components here >recently but I can't find it in my archive. 'Twas a blade like arrangement >as I recall and was apparently favoured for general soldering as well by >users. > Once upon a time I watched two professional painters do the door and window trim in our lab facility. They used EIGHT INCH WIDE BRUSHES, about two inches thick! NO JOKE! They had learned to feather the edges in holding the brushes and could go to a hair fine edge. And back to the paint bucket every other window. Try that with your tiny little brush. The moral: In soldering the object is to get HEAT into the joint as rapidly as possible to melt and flow the solder completely--then get OFF. Thus minimizing total heat flow into the part itself. You can't do this with a teeny-tiny tip--or with a tip that is just over the melting point of the solder. I use what are commonly called bent chisel or bent screw-driver points about 60 mils wide with a 90 watt temperature controlled (But set all the way up) iron designed for maximum heat transfer to the tip. Iron or gold plated so you never need to file them or do any major cleaning, and they don't contribute base metal to the solder. Turn the tip sideways and its only 10-20 mils thick for those narrow pads, flat on for the bigger header pins, and with the long bent edge across multiple pins. All in one. Kelly William K. Borsum, P.E. -- OEM Dataloggers and Instrumentation Systems &