Hello all, this seems like the right place for this question...

The tach in my FD needs repair. Like many, it bounces all over the place, or just stops working occasionally; and then at other times it is OK.

My search/reading here tells me I have to disassemble and resolder it. OK, I can give that a try.

But to be honest, for mechanical work, my hands/skills are adequate. For soldering, I am not sure I have the skill and steady hands needed.

I am willing to go out and buy all the stuff I need, and I will get a magnifier and multi arm aligator clip thingie to hold the parts for me. But I think it would be a good idea to have a practice device/circuit boad that I can desolder and resolder a few times to try to get the skills needed BEFOR I BUTCHER MY GAUGE PANEL.

Does anyone know of a circuit board in any cheap toy or clock or other device that is very similar to the layout (size of trace lines/distance between components/type of construction) that I can buy and user to practice on?

 

computers are too tiny with their solders so i would look for something larger, like a TV, which you should be able to find something for free on craigslist.

 

Radio Shack has small DIY projects. Just grab one while you are getting your soldering station, solder, and what not. Who knows, maybe they have something you could actually use!

 

I suggest to saty away of TV's as a source to practive soldering. The CRT can retain a voltage and if you don't know what your doing it can be dangerous. I'd go the Radio Shack way that was suggested. Heck, you could build a code checker for the TPS while your at it. There are plans on the net.

 

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

As someone who a few years ago was in your shoes, and now today has built entire wiring harnesses and megasquirts for cars:

Soldering is deceptively easy, you just need to understand some basic things. First: I would take some time to decide how into it you're really going to get. There is no reason you won't do very well with a $10 iron from home-depot, but if you think you're going to solder a bunch of stuff and really dive into it like I did, trust me, spend the money and get something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Weller-WES51-A...6131971&sr=8-3

Cheap irons have pathetic quality tips, and take forever to warm up. I recently decided I soldered way too much to suffer through a BS iron and bit the bullet and bought a nice one. It made a WORLD of difference in my joint quality, and in how much I enjoy doing it.

Next tip: get good solder. Almost everything from radioshack sucks. Get some actual leaded or silver bearing solder. I use 1mm for general wire splicing and .015 (hair thin) for ECU/circuit board work. I like using small solder strands because it is easy to put exactly the right amount into a joint, too big and you get these huge blobs. Also, with a weak iron, you may find that too thick of a solder strand doesn't want to melt, though if you buy a nice one it shouldn't be an issue.

Get some GOOD shrink wrap: high contraction rating (3-4:1) and adhesive lined. Cheap stuff is 2:1, no adhesive.

Dab dielectric grease on your joints after you solder them (may not apply to circuit board work).

As for the act itself: wipe off your iron between joints (when you set it down, and when you pick it up), then dab a small bit of solder on it (this will aid in heat flowing from the iron, to the object you're working on). Think of the solder you add to the tip as a heat conductor. If you touch the iron to the component and you don't feel it's getting hot enough, consider adding a little more solder to the tip to help get things moving.

Realize, except for this act of "tinning" i just described, you are not touching the solder strand to the iron itself. Rather, you are getting the stuff you are working on hot enough that it melts the solder on its own when solder touches it. That took me forever to grasp starting out. One joint should only take a couple seconds to do, and you kind of develop a rhythm to it:

touch iron, touch solder, pull away. About as long as it takes you to read that, accentuating the commas, is as long as it should take, unless you have some really thick wires you're splicing you're waiting for them to heat through. remember the solder will want to flow towards the heat, so logically if you have heat on the right, touch the solder on the left side, though unique problems sometimes complicate this.

Clear as mud? Honestly I think the best practice (and luckily this is the cheapest option) is to get a bunch of wire and practice splicing wires together. If you can become God-like at doing that, you should have no problems with anything. That was basically where I was when I built my first megasquirt (no circuit board experience but I could splice wires like a pro) and everything went great.

 

This page may be of some help as well:

http://www.aaroncake.net/electronics/solder.htm