A handheld (“small”) ultrasonic welding tool costs tons and tons of shekels.
I’d rather avoid solder because of its poor IACS being a bottleneck, but I can’t.
What’s the best solder for current delivery on the market today and what’s the best way to implement it to attain as close as possible to a metal-metal interface?
Loop the conductor, then apply minimal solder to keep it in place?
I don’t obsess over solder for my projects. I’ve been buying standard 60/40 solder from partsexpress for years with excellent results. I am big on proper lead forming, however. For all through hole parts I crimp a U in the lead so that when I push it through the hole it snaps in place. I’ve gotten adept at using a needle-nose plier to do the lead crimp trick. That also assures some part of the surface of the lead will make contact with the pad (I’m talking about a PCB, btw). Where necessary I’ll tightly wrap a lead on a lug so that I’m certain of direct metal to metal contact. All of these techniques have the added benefit of requiring minimal solder to secure the connection. When working on audio gear one type of connection I loathe is certain types of RCA connectors that force you to tack the center lead into what amounts to little more than a trough. Typically with thick gold plate and a lot of metal that needs to be heated by the iron to get the solder to flow and stick. Curse words have been uttered trying to solder that type of connection.
Whether or not to obsess over technique of weld/solder is a matter of the materials used… If I buy 7N UP-OCC cryomagnetically treated silver wire, I will obsess over how it’s terminated.
(Not that I’ve bought any yet)
Anyone who’s used let’s say Furutech silver-gold alloy solder, have you noticed audible improvement?
I know people have auditoned different solders.
(A hand-held ultrasonic welder costs 18k$… I wonder why big cable manufacturers don’t just ultrasonic weld their terminations since the machines aren’t a cost object to such companies. I wonder how the perfectionist metallurgists at Siltech make terminations…)
Some, such as Audioquest, use crimp connectors. Cold welded without solder.
For soldering I use Mundorf Silber gold solder with a high silver content.
If you can’t solder cleanly, consider using crimping or screwing for better contact.
With my crossover, I twisted the connections of the components as far as possible and only soldered them to fix them.
Still using regular lead/tin here, nice and easy to use, and I only really work on stuff I’ve built, or stuff that was done with lead/tin solder (such as all my Quad amps) so no issues with mixing types.
Anything more recent (that I play with at the moment) uses surface mount and I’m not about to start working on that stuff again (only did a bit, with proper equipment / microscope etc. whilst working).
I will have two large super caps to solder into one buffer board to feed some of my Pi 4 HATs next week. Ordered some Kester stuffs with high silver content lead free. Heard these solder are tuff to deal with so, ordered a decent solder station and flux to make sure enough heat transfer.
Ton of good solder vids on youtube.
3 responses two years later, you know what they say, it’s never too late!