Microsoldering Beginner’s Guide: It’s Easier Than You Think

Learning microsoldering isn’t as hard as you might think. In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at the tools needed to get started and provide a comprehensive guide to help you become a microsoldering pro.

Soldering has been one of the most useful skills I’ve learned over the years, and it’s not just for fixing electronics. It can also be a fun hobby that opens the door to making everything from DIY air quality monitors to 3D-printed arcade machines.

The most basic version of soldering is called “through-hole” because you put a wire through a hole in a printed circuit board (PCB), then secure it with a little bead of solder. However, through-hole soldering has its limits, and that’s where microsoldering comes in.

Microsoldering is the art of soldering components of the microscopic persuasion. The tools necessary to see the workspace can range from a $30 head-mounted magnifier to a $2,000 microscope. The same applies to microsoldering irons; there are cheap and cheerful options all the way up to thousand-plus-dollar professional-grade tools.

How much you spend on the tools depends on how deep you want to get into microsoldering. Generally speaking, the higher-value tools allow you to perform repairs that would be difficult or impossible with the cheaper tools.

But the tools alone won’t make you a microsoldering wizard. They wouldn’t even make you a wizard’s apprentice. So, I needed to learn some basics first, and for that, I was lucky enough to attend Jessa Jones’ iPad Rehab: Practical Board Repair School.

Jessa Jones’ iPad Rehab: Practical Board Repair School was an invaluable experience that taught me the basics of microsoldering. It wasn’t always easy, but I came away with renewed confidence in what I’d been telling people every day since joining the repair community: With the right parts, tools, and information, just about anyone can figure out repair.

One of the most important lessons I learned was understanding how heat spreads through the work surface. We were working on a relatively tiny iPhone logic board with a relatively small thermal mass, but heat management was still critical to get the job done.

So, what did we learn today? A whole day of microsoldering school, and I didn’t even touch a soldering iron! But I got up close and personal with the technique for solving Touch Disease, which lots of people think even Apple wasn’t fixing, just replacing affected phones.

It was also enlightening to get a feel for how heat behaves across the medium I’m working on. You could argue that soldering and microsoldering really boil down to understanding how heat behaves when it comes into contact with different materials.

With a few hours of microsoldering experience, I was already convinced that these techniques could save my time, my money, and my electronics. But what about other common problems on boards? Stay tuned for Day Two of microsoldering school, where we’ll touch on more advanced topics.

At Salvation Repair, we offer a limited lifetime guarantee of all parts and labor. Our team of experts is dedicated to providing the best repair services possible. If you’re interested in learning more about microsoldering or scheduling a repair, visit our website at https://salvationrepair.com/repair.