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It supplies heat to melt solder so that it can flow into the joint between two workpieces. A soldering iron is composed of a heated metal tip (the bit ) and an insulated handle. Heating is often achieved electrically, by passing an electric current (supplied through an electrical cord or battery cables) through a resistive heating element .
Soldering guns are used where more heat is needed than from the lower-power soldering irons. They can be used for heavy electrical connections, stained glass assembly, and light sheet-metal work. Typical soldering guns are rated at 100 to 240 watts power. A gun may include a two-stage trigger to give two heat settings.
The most common are the models with 50-80 W power. The higher is the power the more amount of heat you may transmit for the same time. It allows reducing the temperature on the heating element to the minimal possible value for melting the solder alloy. And vice versa – the lower is the power the higher temperature you need to melt the solder.
In brazing, one generally uses rods that are touched to the joint while being heated. With silver soldering, small pieces of solder wire are placed onto the metal prior to heating. A flux, often made of boric acid and denatured alcohol, is used to keep the metal and solder clean and to prevent the solder from moving before it melts.
Pin brazing is a metallurgically safe [citation needed] method of making electrical connections [1] to steel and ductile iron pipelines [citation needed] as well as other metallic structures, [2] which are to be cathodically protected or electrically earthed.
Reflow soldering is a process in which a solder paste (a sticky mixture of powdered solder and flux) is used to temporarily attach anywhere from one to thousands of tiny electrical components to their contact pads, after which the entire assembly is subjected to controlled heat. The solder paste reflows in a molten state, creating permanent ...
Then localised heat is applied to the component to remove, with less heating required than from cold. Most frequently, a hot air (or hot gas) gun, with a nozzle of appropriate size and shape, is used to heat the component, with nearby components shielded from the heat if necessary, followed by removal with tweezers or a vacuum tool.
Soldering performed using alloys with a melting point above 450 °C (840 °F; 720 K) is called "hard soldering", "silver soldering", or brazing. In specific proportions, some alloys are eutectic — that is, the alloy's melting point is the lowest possible for a mixture of those components, and coincides with the freezing point.