 All right, the great search brought to you by a friend Digikey. This is a question from our TikTok, and this is what's gonna be this week's great search. What type of brands are you use for projects? Down to my last. Spool from Radio Shack. It's from Robbie. Crying tears, Moji. Okay, Robbie, a great question. Because, yeah, solder is not as easy as it used to be. And yeah, a lot of people really liked solder that they could get from the local electronics shop. And I thought I would show that you can buy solder from Digikey, which is kind of obvious. Of course, they would sell solder, but a lot of people don't think about that. They end up buying it from elsewhere because they don't like your hardware store or whatever. When in fact, you can buy pretty much any kind of solder you like from Digikey. So let's go check out what's available on the Digikey site for solder. Okay, so let's open up Digikey. And so one thing I wanted to show is the person asked, how do I get, you know, I got my Radio Shack solder. So what a lot of people, when they say that, what they mean is, I don't know, move this over here. They mean the silver-bearing, oh, sorry, they mean the silver-bearing solder. This is kind of like a famous, not inexpensive, but really popular solder that was available for many, many years at your local shop. And one cool thing about solder is you can, you know, solder is solder, like pretty much, as long as you get the same metal contributions correct, like all the different metals that are inside of the solder, you're gonna have the same experience, which is really good. So if you want to like get a pound of this instead of, you know, 1.5 ounces, it's possible. But here's something to watch for. So I went to Digikey and I just typed in, you know, this says silver-bearing solder. And I was like, okay, I'll search for like silver solder. And what came up was actually, you know, there's a couple categories, but if you go to solder, you'll notice that they do have solder, but the only ones that come up under this search are these lead-free solders that are, and then you have to look at the composition, 96% tin and 4% silver. So let me show also only the in stock, which is not what you want, right? This composition is not the composition you see in this photo, which is 62, 36, 2, and it says here, tin, 62, lead, 36, silver, 2. And if you're wondering like, well, how do you know what all these are? You look it up in your periodic table, the elements, that's how these are labeled. So they don't literally say lead. Well, there's some things that lead free, but they won't say like tin, 8% or whatever. You have to look up the symbol on your periodic table. So having done that, and if you look at this and you're probably thinking, well, they don't stock the kind of solder, but it's not true, they do. You just have to know how to search for it. So instead, what you want to search for is wire solder, and solder comes in like bars and paste and stuff, but we're looking for the wire solder style and then click on solder. I'm sure like the British people are like, it's solder. Sorry, I'm American, it's solder here. Okay, and then let's go to active just so we only get stuff we can get. And again, we want wire solder, so let's select that. And there's all these different brands, but here you can see the compositions. And again, it's in chemical percentage style. So you'll have to like read carefully because there's like a lot of letters and numbers. And they're not sorted because it's not a number. So going back, this is 10, 62% lead 36. So let's even get close. So this is lead 60, 1040, that's not what we want. We want like, okay, this looks pretty close. There's 10, 62, lead 36, silver two. Okay, so this is what we want. And then let's just make sure there's nothing else. There's a couple other silver ones with this AG symbol, but they have like more tin. We want the tin lead. Now I'll say this is, obviously it has lead in it. It is not lead free solder. So if you are running a Rojas shop or you're trying to be a lead free operation, you wouldn't use this in production. However, I do use lead solder when I'm putting together prototypes. Why? It is a lot easier to use and it's a lot easier to rework. And if I'm doing prototypes, I may not have all the tools that we have in production or we do, you know, stenciling and we have optical inspection. So I might use leaded solder at home because I'm in America and it's legal to use leaded solder. This is a land of the free and the leaded. Okay, so apply to only see those. All right, so now we have a lot of options but let's look at only the ones in stock because I'm gonna order this today. So first thing you note is there's a couple different packages and a couple different width of solder. So the diameter of the solder is also something you want to pay attention to. So you can see here there's half a millimeter and 0.8 millimeters or 0.02 inch or 0.03 inch. Which do you want? Well, if you're doing fine pitch soldering, usually you probably wanna go with 0.02 or even 0.15, 0.015. If you're doing a lot of thick through-hole, like chunky stuff, 0.031. I happen to like 0.02 even for the thick stuff but like it's, you can also try a little bit of each but basically for SMT 0.02 through-hole, I like 0.03. If you look at this, this is kind of right in the middle there, it's 0.022 but let's just say 0.2, 0.02. You know what I mean. All right, so now we only have nine options. So now the options are, there's a couple of different suppliers, there's Chip Quick and there's Kester and there's different packages. So you can get these little spools. Now personally, I can't stand these. I always feel like there's just way too little solder but if you're only doing a couple repairs once in a while and it goes in your toolbox, you know what, these aren't too bad and they're inexpensive. This is six bucks, which is pretty cheap for silver solder. That said, you could also, if you're just going like whole hog, you can get from Kester a one pound spool or from Chip Quick, they also have a one pound spool and so this is a one pound spool. You know, this lasts like a really long time. Like even I using solder all the time, this will last me more than a year. So a pound is quite a bit that said, you know, if you really like this solder, you pick up a pound of it for 50 bucks and you're like, you never have to think about it again. But you know, let's say we're not like that. We want like this one is one and a half ounces, 42 grams. I personally think that you should probably get about 50 grams plus of solder. Anything less than I think you're just gonna be frustrated because you're running out unexpectedly. So let's look at the two and four ounce, maybe also the eight ounce and let's ignore the one ounce spool, way too small and the less than one ounce tubes also ridiculous. Oh, another thing just to watch for is there's a couple of different fluxes available. There's no clean water soluble and rosin activated. Now, technically, I believe that this silver bearing solder even though it's not mentioned here, I believe it is rosin activated, which is a solder that's technically you need to clean off and I personally prefer no clean and luckily when you're looking for these sizes, it's only available no clean. You know, if you really want to research whether you want activated, activated is gonna be a little bit easier to solder and we work with, but it is active like you should clean it off after you're done. Whereas no clean, you don't have to clean. Okay, so given that these are all no clean, here's your options. So you can get two, four and eight ounce for about 12, 20 and $25. The more you get cheaper, it's gonna be, that's just how it goes. It's kind of like some incentive to get a little bit more, but this two ounce is still a pretty good amount. This will last you a month or two at least, even if you're doing a lot of soldering. So I would pick this up. This one is my recommended. So SMD3SW from Chipquick, leaded solder. If you are in, I just wanna go back, even though it's my pick, going back to wire solder, if you're in a, you know, your real house, you are lead free, click the real house compliant checkbox. And then when you search, you're not gonna get the leaded solder over here. You're gonna get only the tin and silver. And for that, you know, the one I tend to use when I have to go lead free is this one, which, let me see if I can read off what it says. This one is a 96.5, tin and 3% silver and a little bit of copper. So it's like one of these, but you know, you can also look online, there's people who definitely have, I mean, like there's gonna be a lot more lead free solder options because people are so picky and it's so difficult to work with these solders. Another thing of course you can do is just look at, you know, what's the most popular by searching for stock and then reverse searching by a mountain stock. So yeah, these kesters and multi cores, this one is pretty popular, this lead free. So that might tell you like, you know, what you might wanna pick up because it's like everyone else seems to like it, you might like it too. But definitely, you know, if you're looking for lead free, you're not gonna be able to get that nice silver bearing solder, you're gonna have silver in your soldering wire, but it's not gonna be the same solder you think you remember from when you were a kid, putting together two whole kits from Radio Shack. All right, and that's a great church. Thank you.