Soldering Alternatives

[PennyroyalTea2]

Is their any alternatives to soldering ?

I have heard about wiring glue. From my understand the connection will only last for about maybe 5 years ?

Any info would be great, thanks.

[Scruffie]

I think I read that in the very early days (someone will probably be able to confirm or deny this) that wires were tied together and sealed with epoxy.

[PennyroyalTea2]

Cool , Can always somehow strengthen it with electric tape , if the size can be cut right. Won't bother me if it falls apart 5 years from now. just take care of it.

[GGBB]

Assuming a PCB is not part of the equation:

[PennyroyalTea2]

Assuming a PCB is not part of the equation:

Yeah nothing like that .

This is what I found and it sounds pretty darn good. FAB FLANGE Modded to be rather close to Polychorus.

http://ketchupfeet.blogspot.com/2011/12/fab-flange-space-mod.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxYHoMiQFB4

[amptramp]

There is always wire wrap:

http://www.jameco.com/jameco/workshop/techtip/wirewrap.html

[Jdansti]

If you're referring to the hot glue mentioned here: http://ketchupfeet.blogspot.com/2011/12/fab-flange-space-mod.html. I think it's only used as strain relief and not to make an electrical connection.

Is there a reason why you don't want to solder?

[MaxPower]

Breadboard. Will make it easy to mod/repair the circuit later on!

[Rixen]

more wirewrap.. this is part of a FFT spectrum analyser (Mini Ubiquitous) that was built in TTL...

topside...


bottomside...



I also used to have a huge motherboard that was wirewrapped with fine enameled wire, then coated with epoxy. Looked like a superfine PCB until looking closely revealed the 'tracks' were crossing each other...

Julian
www.rixenpedals.com

[R.G.]

Is their any alternatives to soldering ?

I have heard about wiring glue. From my understand the connection will only last for about maybe 5 years ?

Any info would be great, thanks.

Can you state clearly what problem you're trying to solve?

The modern electronics industry is composed of lots of smart, determined, and highly pragmatic people. They would jump immediately to any technique that replaced having to run large machines filled with molten metal if they could get even moderately equivalent results. And governments are composed of people who LIKE to tell other people what to do, and enjoy upsetting any commercial applecart, so they would immediately make solder illegal if they could do it and not destroy the tax revenues from the electronics industries. So it's not like people haven't thought about replacing solder. They just haven't come up with any good replacement.

You can replace solder with mechanical attachments, the like of which is the variety of plastic covered clamps you saw from the pictures. These are all larger and generally more cumbersome than soldered connections. You can spot weld wires together and avoid solder entirely; some ICs are made with lead wires spot welded to the chips, and some military/space electronics used to be made with spot welded connections. Wire-wrap was developed specifically to be a mechanical replacement for soldering, and is the most successful non-solder connection system.

There exist elastomeric systems with embedded vertical conduction fibers for very fine-pitch pressure connections on things like LCD panels.

And there are conductive paints and glues. These contain a lot of fine conductive fibers, which can (usually  ) be relied upon to make conductive contact once the goop is cured. Their problems usually reduce down to (1) their conductivity is not nearly as good as a metal wire, so they're much higher resistance and (2) the goop holding the conductive fibers doesn't last as long as a soldered connection.

Lasting a long time is not as simple an issue as you think. Any good electronics tech will tell you that every repair involves some amount of damage to the thing being repaired. If you fix something often enough the damage accumulates until the next "fix" is a rebuild. That's probably OK for a few cycles, but all of the environmentally conscious people shudder in horror at the idea of tossing something into a landfill because it can't be repaired.

So, again the question is this: what problem are you trying to solve? I can only guess at a partial list.
- no access to a soldering iron?
- no skill with a soldering iron?
- laws or parental rules preventing soldering?
- a general avoidance of of metals as "bad"?
- intellectual curiosity?
- a general desire to do something differently because different is better somehow?

[thermionix]

Maybe heat is what OP would like to avoid.  Every time I've seen wire wrap, I've wondered how long it would take before oxidation would become a problem.  I've had limited experience with conductive epoxy, and I was not impressed.  It was a stop-gap solution to attach anode leads on CRTs.  Sure it would conduct well enough with 7KV on it, but it would fall off if you looked at it funny.

[R.G.]

Maybe heat is what OP would like to avoid.

That is possible. The illustration was circuit bending, and I suppose not hosing up the circuit being bent with a hot iron is a reasonable goal.

I have a bit of a blind spot there. I've been soldering so long that controlling the heat at even tiny joints is second nature. I solder 0603 SMD stuff by hand pretty regularly as needed. Tacking on a thin wire to an SMD solder pad is a fairly standard way to debug. I suspect that is why I jumped to solder skills as a question.

Every time I've seen wire wrap, I've wondered how long it would take before oxidation would become a problem.

Wire wrap was designed specifically so that oxidation would not be a problem. In actual practice, properly done wire wrap (like properly done anything, I suppose; you can always hose something up  ) lasts indefinitely in normal atmospheres.

Wire wrap wire, pins, and wrapping technique are designed so that the wrapping tension on the wire causes the sharp corners of the post to bite into the plating on the wire. These form "gas-tight, high-pressure contact points" which are high enough pressure to exclude atmospheric oxygen, and usually sulfur, etc. from the contact points.

Well-done wire wrap lasts decades, perhaps longer. Usually longer than the need for the equipment. Major portions of computer mainframes were done in wire wrap, and they were really concerned that contacts didn't get flakey, as was the telecommunications industry that used wire wrap for complex routing setups.

Here's something that's more worrisome. Wire wrap posts have four GTHP connections per turn, and a proper connection was seven? nine? turns, for 28 to 36 contact points per wire. All had to fail to make the connection fail. The network cables connecting your computer to the network, and a major fraction of all the internet's traffic is carried on connectors which punch down a wire into a sharp V-fork, giving two GTHP contacts per wire. Losing two contacts on any of the eight wires in a connector disables the connection.

[Vitrolin]

the way the tele comunications system is designe there are multiple ways for each signals to travel through out the grid so you're not relying on one single wire to maintain good contact, and replacement must be way faster with ribbon cable and other inferior crimped wires.

[PennyroyalTea2]

The issue I have with soldering is knowing impatient me would end up sticking too much on lol'

So I want to know if their is an alternative , especially to just hold it in place so I could maybe solder it later 

[Rixen]

The only thing I can think of that's faster than soldering is plug in breadboards...

if you're working with PCB's a piece of foam pushed against the component side to keep components in place is great, and not hard to make a jig to do that..

[Ice-9]

There is always wire wrap:

http://www.jameco.com/jameco/workshop/techtip/wirewrap.html

Yup , good old wire wrap, done with the correct tools and supplies is super reliable, but don't try and build something into a 1590a

[Rixen]

OT, was it 'Talking Electronics' magazine that used to publish free printed cardboard wire-wrap circuits with their magazine ? One inserted the components into the cardboard and wire-wrapped with a pen style tool to make the circuit.

[Jdansti]

When I was a kid in the 60's, I didn't have money to buy electronic equipment. I used to read the ads for wire wrap equipment in Dad's Popular Electronics magazines and dream of building stuff with wire wrap one day. LOL!

[Giglawyer]

There is always wire wrap:

http://www.jameco.com/jameco/workshop/techtip/wirewrap.html

looks like the guts from some of my builds...

[R.G.]

The issue I have with soldering is knowing impatient me would end up sticking too much on lol'

So I want to know if their is an alternative , especially to just hold it in place so I could maybe solder it later 

OK. That's a very sensible reason.

If you intend to do more than the smallest, crudest electronics, spend some time just learning to solder. Clean the joints and parts to be joined, flux them, and get in quick with high heat and *little* solder, then get out fast so that the heat doesn't have time to travel up from the actual joint and cook other things. Get some throwaway parts, even as little as bits of wire or resistor leads you've saved, and go practice on something you can't mess up, until you develop the skills.

I know this presents a problem if you are impatient, but believe me, you will save hundreds of times as much time later by NOT messing up the soldering you do when it matters. Don't learn on something you can't throw away. Consider the materials you "waste" learning to be the equivalent of paying for textbooks and pencils. And consider: if you make your early mistakes on stuff you can quietly throw away when nobody is looking, you won't waste the expensive stuff you do later. It's a whole lot like practicing on guitar. Make your mistakes, and lots of them, in private. When it gets easy, then get on stage.

There are a few ways that I have used that seem to work well.

If you happen to be using double-sided PCB with plated-through holes, there will be pads on both top and bottom. Suspend the board above your table, propping it up with a couple of bits of 2x4 lumber cutoffs or a pile of books, or something to hold it up so you can stick leads through without clipping them off first. Then when you have a batch of components in the proper locations, check to see you got them in the right places, then - carefully - solder one lead per component from the top. Solder is not glue, but it works well enough for this micro-glue case. Once you're done, you can flip the board over and solder them all.

Then there's real glues. Why not stick a dot of sticky goo right under where the component body goes when you insert it into the holes? A lot of PCBs were manufactured this way back in the bad old through-hole days. Any goop that's sticky, won't run to liquid under heat, and is not conductive will do. You only need a dot, maybe the amount transferred from the wetted tip of a toothpick, to hold a resistor while you flip the board and solder it. Superglue works, but it's usually too strong later. And messy. The older celluloid glues are great for this. As is a clear stuff I've seen called "museum glue" and the stuff you put on walls to hold up posters. Pine tree sap is great for it too.

Another way is to build from the surface of the PCB outwards. Put all of the shortest parts - small resistors and diodes - flat on the board first, then put a bit of foam or cardboard over them, hold the cover/parts/PCB sandwich together and flip it over, sliding it onto the table with the leads sticking up. Now gravity is holding the PCB down on the parts and you can solder in a skillful manner.  Then put on the batch of the next-highest parts. The ones you've soldered on will stay put.

IMHO, there are no suitable alternatives for what you've described. There are difficult, clumsy, and expensive ways around solder, but that's not where you're headed. Buy some parts to learn to solder on, make your mistakes and burned fingers on the learning exercises/parts, then throw them away. Don't start off learning to solder on something you have to make work - and ought to be proud of when you get done.

Not what you wanted to hear, I know, but I think it's good advice.