 I have a new soldering iron. This is a cheap and cheerful desoldering tool which I got mail order from China for about five francs, ten francs, about that. It's not actually new. I've had this a few times in videos. What it's for is for removing components from PCBs. The tip is heated. There's a plunger here. What you do is you stab this end onto the bottom of the component to push the button. And the heated tip melts the solder around the pin and the plunger sucks the solder out of it. It is very simple and amazingly effective. And I have some questions about it at which I want to resolve in this video. The first question is that I haven't actually figured out where the solder comes out, that it sucks up. And I want to take the tip apart just to make sure that it's not like getting gummed up inside here. The other is it's, well, it's mains powered stuff from a grey market Chinese employer. I mean, there's stuff wrong with this. The earth thing, well, it's earth. Look, here's the earth wire. So one of the other things I want to do is to replace this cable and this excruciating excuse for a plug, which is wrong in so many ways. And also check to see if there's like insulation, electrical insulation. So, let's get started. Let me begin by taking the tip off. Let's try unscrewing this. It did come with some replacement tips. That feels bad. I believe that you want to do these and then the tips should just pull off. No, actually. No, that's removing the entire heating element. That's not right. Well, I wanted to take that off anyway, but I'm going to start with the tip. Put these back in again. It's possible the tip just unscrews. It did come with a couple which I think I have lost. The tip is a hollow cone with a hole in the end. It heats up with the element and the sucker pulls through the top of the hole. Wow, I am lucid today, aren't I? There we go. Got some screws. So, I see no signs of solder. There is some gunk inside this. I wonder if that's solder buildup. In which case, that won't do any harm. Not the little solder buildup. It won't do any harm for the solder to build up inside this because this is the bit that gets hot. So, the solder will always end up being pushed out. Okay, so I wonder if I need to take this off. It's actually pretty well designed. It's astonishingly effective. It makes really easy work of desoldering stuff which, well, if you've seen some of my videos where I didn't use it, I'll make a complete dog's dinner off. And I've seen others of these. This one has got some rather nice features like the fact that the plunger is in this plastic guide which means that if it didn't have the guide then when you push the button and the plunger pops up and you're leaning down over the work you can actually plunge yourself in the face which you can't do with this one. But I am extremely pleased... Ah, that's better. That's coming off. I'm extremely pleased with it in terms of, you know, functionality. It's the other stuff I'm not so keen about. Okay, now I need to take this off. These rings. That ring comes off. This is the heating element. Yeah, the heating element just pushes into this tube. These wires connect it to the mains. Now, I see this. This is very nice to see. This is the earthing cable but some of these don't have them. And that is... Actually, how was that connected? This looks like a micro-insulation ring. This stops the plastic of the handle melting when the element heats up. Now, I didn't spot where this was actually attached. That may show up on the video. Hopefully it wasn't fastened to the underside of the insulation because that wouldn't have made electrical contact. This is for grounding this. I also spot that it's not actually fastened on at all. Well, yeah, that's not so hot. So what have we got in here? We have waxy insulation for the top of the heating element. Yeah. Okay, well, I'm reasonably happy with the way this side of thing works. I am not so happy with this joint here. You can see it's very floppy. That's because it's barely attached to the end of the earth wire. There's only slack there with a bit. Is that actually the end of this wire? Yes, it is. As I pull it out this side, it goes in here. So this is, in fact, the earth wire. Yikes. Right, well, I've got some space to work with. Let's get some... Is that actually so bad? No, actually, I think that's okay. I think it was just the geometry made it feel worse than it is. So what I was worried about was that the wire is soldered to this tag, which is supposed to the heating element. And I was worried that this joint was fraying. That's actually... No, let's take that off. Yeah, that should have been harder to do than that. Okay, soldering iron on. Stripper tool. That is, in fact, an extremely thin wire. I'm not happy with that. It is at least brown, so it could be copper. So let's tin the end. So the soldering iron I've got in my right hand is, thermostatically, you, that's not good. Not like done to that. That has actually tinned, but it's just really ugly. So my main soldering iron is thermostatically controlled. It has a temperature sensor, and it adjusts the heat output to maintain a particular temperature. And you can actually program in the temperature in the control panel. This also costs me no money from China. This stuff's great. This is what's called a thermally balanced soldering iron, where the heating element just outputs heat at a constant rate. And the element heats up until the rate at which it loses heat due to radiation matches the rate at which heat is dumped into it by the element. I mean, there's nothing wrong with them. It's a perfectly fine way to make a soldering iron, and most cheap soldering irons work like that. But the thermostatically controlled one is just easy to use. I will actually put some new solder onto the tag. The tag solder I've got in the spool is a leaded solder. Which is vastly easier to work with than the lead-free solder. They have to use in commercial products. They use lead-free solder in commercial products, because there's so much of it. For hobby use, that's a terrible joint. I've made some terrible joints in my time, and that was definitely one. Okay, that looks way more rust. For hobby use, a leaded solder is absolutely fine. There's so little of it. I mean, this is going to last me years. That is not actually a environmental risk. Okay, I am curious to be honest. There are three holes. They're not aligned the same way. So it needs to go... This hole is further in towards the centre than these two are. So it needs to be aligned like this. It goes on like this. Where do I put the solder tag? I think that originally it was on the inside of the insulation. It was fastened on like this. That would have made terrible contact. Terrible electrical contact. Because the metal screw pushes in from this side. So it would have been sheer luck whether there was any contact between the tag and the screw. That's not good. Now I could tuck it under the insulation so that it was sandwiched between the metal and the insulation. But then that will put the wire by necessity right next to the element where it will get hot. I don't like that. So the wires come out of the channel here. They arrange like this. So I think what I'm actually going to do is put this on the outside. I've got my insulation disc rotated. Let's try that. I'm going to simply have this come out and then go on and screw on like that. This is just for earthing so that's perfectly safe. But it will keep the wire clear of the element and guarantee good contact. So let's just put a screw in to hold it all together. The disc is making interesting crunching sounds. It should actually be mica, which is a mineral element traditionally used for insulation. You don't see it much these days. It's very good at high temperatures. So this should go on like so. You can't see a thing from the angle of the camera. This is not a good thing to video, to be honest. It's just so awkward. OK, that's now fastened down and we have a big loop of wire. So all I do is I pull from this end. That goes down like this. I think I will actually swing that out slightly. Let's try it about there. OK, so let's just put this bit back together. I'm fairly happy with this end of the soldering iron. I don't see anything particularly obviously wrong there. It's properly earthed. There is a piece of insulation separating the element from the plastic because it's properly earthed now. It may not have been before. Let's tackle the other end and the wire. I'm in trouble getting this little screw in. It won't line up in the thread properly. There we go. Right, so let's have a look at the other end of the iron. Now the first thing, if you know anything about plugs that comes to mind is this. If you don't know anything about plugs this won't look particularly dodgy. Here is a real Swiss plug. Let's just take this label off. Now this one is earthed. Switzerland uses standard two-pin Euro plug style with an extra earth pin that's offset to one side which is subtly different from the other European countries. Now this one is obviously not earthed but you also notice that the actual pins themselves are not sleeved. This is very dubious. The reason for the sleeving is so that when you push the plug partway into the socket by the time the pins make contact with the actual live connections inside the socket you then now cannot get a finger in the gap and touch live metal. You can do this. So if you're putting the thing into the socket and your finger slips up like this you can get an electric shock from one of these. I forgot a bit. I'll put that on them in a moment. Let's tackle this end first. So I'm actually going to replace the entire cable. Well, I'm going to put a new plug on it, this one. But in the process I'm going to replace the entire cable with this which is a surplus cable I found and draw for some unknown country. I don't know what this plug is. I do really. This is actually to win an earth wire. So it does have an earth strand. This wire does not have an earth strand and it feels very thin and flexible. And it says on it... What does it say? Yuyao shi zin jiang jiang jiang which is presumably the manufacturer. 300 volts. It doesn't have a current on it. No, it does not have a current rating on it which is... Because it should... This thing claims to draw 30 watts. I haven't plugged this into my power meter so I don't know what it actually draws but I would not be at all surprised if this was underspect. So... How do I... This is a plastic pad. A plastic hatch underneath the actual connections will be. Let's open it up and see what's on the inside. Hopefully screw terminals. Maybe just a solder joint. Oh, bloody hell. Bloody, bloody hell. I'm so glad I took this apart. Okay, this warrants some zoom actually. I'll just readjust the camera and be right back. Okay, here we are on max zoom. And can you see what I can see? So here we have the insulated cables for the element. And you notice these are whiter to this end but they were red at the other end. So that's interesting. And here they are just looped around the mains cables. Now it looks a little bit worse than it was. It should be like this. So the two cables are in fact separated into different channels. But yikes. Okay, I see what's happening. Right, that's not actually quite as bad as I thought. So, what is happening is... The thin wire here, it runs up, hooks around the wire and then comes down here. And the copper wire is then wrapped tightly around the metal wire. So it's actually making pretty good physical contact. I don't like it but it's not as bad as it looks. However, it is a type of joint that I do not believe I can duplicate. I'm also curious to know why this is braided at this end. But down at this end, it's just red insulated cable. Now there's sucker unit I believe is glued in and just won't come out. This twin unearthed cable looks rather better than I was expecting. It is actually copper. It looks reasonably thick. I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with that. These joints scare me though. The obvious way to connect the proper mains cable to these little wires is to solder them. But given the colour of these, I am not sure they will take solder. So down... I suspect that these are proper... This is high temperature insulation. So why there isn't any down here is a very interesting question. And I am actually going to take this apart again because I want to investigate that more. So let's put the camera back to normal. Okay, let's undo these again. I mean I have to do this anyway in order to put that ring on as I forgot about. Actually I need to take these off too. Yeah, this isn't going to be as easy as I thought to be honest. Okay, one other thing I've noticed is... Is that a solder? So this is the tube down along which the sucker sucks. And this pushes in... This looks like wax, which I believe is a... I think that's a sealing compound. I see what's happening with the insulation. This is not, as I thought, PVC insulation. It's textured, it's high temperature stuff. But what I do see is that... And you make that out here. We have two very thin wires coming down these channels. And the insulation doesn't reach all the way to the channels. Now is that because I've been pulling this end... I've been pulling the wires out. Do I need to pull them back? Yes. Okay. That could be better insulated, I think. I mean, having insulation run all the way along. So what I believe is happening is that there's this white insulation that runs down to about here. And then there's bare wires in individual channels down the spine of this thing. And then they come out of holes here into these red sleeves to go to the actual element. So I think that's fine, provided I remember to yank these wires up and pull everything tight down in this end. Can't say I am a fan, though. Is there anything I can do about this? I don't think I can get wire down those channels. Those are extremely thin wires, and that is an extremely small channel. So I think we just have to trust geometry to get that right. Let us insert the sucky thing into the hole. This plate goes on this way up. Earthing tab sandwiched between the outer plate and the inner plate. So this is really awkward. I've got the mica plate rotated in the wrong direction. Let's do that. Okay, now we do it up. Right. And then we come to the other screws. I had another screw here somewhere. I turn this. Okay. Again. Yeah, I'm not actually... I am less enthused than I was. So I am... I actually have a visual aid as soon as I have a hand free. I do have a yellow box, which I use when I use with this. This is an RCD. Really intended for outdoor work. What it does is it measures the current between the... It measures the current difference between live and earth and neutral and earth. If it sees that there is any current flow on earth or that there is a difference in current flow down live or neutral, then it means that current is going somewhere where it shouldn't be and it breaks the circuit. They are extremely worthwhile when dealing with any kind of power tool. Okay, so that tightens a little. So I do intend to use this with this. However, I particularly want the earth hooked up as well because you can never have too many safety features and also want to be sure... Right. Yes. Right, these are just twisted together. That stuff I was talking about a clever way of crimping them together. I was wrong. They are just twisted together. That's awful. I can just untwist them. Plus, there are several different types of RCD and some of them require earth and some of them don't, as far as I'm aware. So I just want to make sure that everything is hooked up correctly for safety reasons. Right, so what am I going to do with this? Okay, here's a piece of chocolate block. Also a screw terminal connector. Now there's no reason why I simply couldn't stick one of these on here. The trouble is that we are dealing with mains and you can't actually get your finger in the touch any of the metal, but it's still not particularly great. So even if the wires are capable of safely transporting that much current, they are kind of thin to make secure contact with the chocolate block. So see, this is a good size. This will fit very nicely into one of these connectors and then when you do the screw up, it will crunch down. So let's get rid of this horrible plug, which says 250 volts, 7 amps. Yeah, right. Of course, the question now is, will I be actually making it safer by doing this? It's here. Okay, and we have some holes. Yeah, this is not going to work. I'm going to have to rethink this. So the fundamental question is, how do I connect this to this? I normally work with low voltage stuff, like computers and digital electronics and that sort of thing. And I am not comfortable with mains. And with things that you're not comfortable with that can kill you, you do want to be careful. I think I'm going to edit out about the last half hour to 45 minutes of video because it just hasn't worked. So my theory is that the solder will stick to the solder tab, even though it won't necessarily stick to this wire. And if I put enough solder on it will actually make a connection. Yeah, who knows whether that will work. But it didn't actually make any contact at all. There are two strands of this stuff. Yeah, the solder is just not sticking to the solder tab. So what I'm actually doing is I'm applying enough solder to capture the wire inside the solder. This is not good. Well, this is turning into a complete disaster. Someone did suggest a plan, which is to wrap ordinary copper wire around this mysterious silver stuff and then liberally dunking the whole thing in solder to hold it together. Okay, what's that actually done now? It's really not good. I suspect that's going to be about as good as I'm going to get. Also, the other thing I forgot to do, which I'll actually do that now, is apply some flux because that will probably help things no end. Now it has actually hooked together. I can do this. It's heat proof after all. It has kind of, can you see that? It has kind of trapped the silver wire. Cut them about here. Sorry, short. Then we should be able to remove the insulation. And this should give me bits of wire that I can actually solder this stuff onto. So this wire will come into here and I actually need a very small tail that solders onto these bits. So let's give this a try. In order to strip this, I will need an actual knife. So like here, ceramic cooking knives. They are awesome. So I'm way out of practice doing this. I hate stripping wire. I don't want to cut into the actual connectors underneath. So there we go. There's an actor being really careful. What the hell? The colors are these. Quite blue. Oh dear, I'm going to have to sand these out. Are these the American colors? I was expecting either red, black and green or brown, blue and green. Earth is green. Neutral and live don't really matter. So neutral is white and live is, of course, must therefore be black. I'm not going to use this plug. I'm going to put a Swiss plug on it, but I want the wiring to be sane. Okay, well, green goes down the middle and black and white go on each side. That's sensible enough. So we now need to strip these. Yeah, this is the American colors where black is live, a.k.a. hot. White is neutral and green is earth. So that's going to go in like this. I need a way to, rather need a way to hold this in place while I solder it, to be honest. But first I will tin these. This is a big chunky, these are big chunky connectors. And it's sucking the heat out of the soldering iron. So that's actually quite hard to solder. Okay, now I think I need to tin these. A bit more flux. You never have too much flux. Unless it goes all runny and waxy and dribbles everywhere. Okay, that one. And that's that one. All right. So the positioning is, ooh, ooh, ow. Okay, still hot. This has, right, that was actually... Yeah, then what the solder was actually, it's stiffer now it's cooled. I just have to touch it while the solder at one end was still running. I wonder if I'm actually getting the bit where I burned myself into the camera footage. That'd be nice. So I now need to try and get this like so. Now I should just be able to melt this and it will bond together too. All right, now the earth wire's not in yet but let's just try putting this on to see if it works. Now that seems to fit into place. And the plunger plungers... Okay, that looks like it's going to work. Good. The last bit is I need to do the earth wire itself which is the whole point of the flipping exercise. But that's fairly straightforward. I just need to cut this here. Strip, tin, pretty thin earth wire to be honest. Into the slot that makes contact here. Apply some heat to melt this together. Like so. Okay, that should it be, it's electrically finished. This dodgy is held but I think it is actually less dodgy than it was when I started working on this. But that's actually some conductivity checks. I'm not using this plug. Yeah, I did mention that. Handing out of hands again. Okay, that looks okay. Good. So let's quickly put the cover back on before something else breaks. And this will also keep the wire in place. I needed a small screw. These screws are going to crush the wire down and hold it in place. It doesn't really have a cable relief but this should do well enough. Now that's gone flat. Awesome. That looks robust actually. And we're not doing anything with the back here so let's see if we can get the sticker back on to cover the holes. Now it just doesn't stick anymore. Never mind. Okay, I think that bit's done then. I don't need the soldering iron anymore. I may have mentioned but at some point I need to check the soldering iron. Erthing 2. Alright, now this bit, I know how to do. This is a Swiss mains plug. As you can see it has shielded live and current pins. It's got a cable relief. It's got a polarised earth pin. So this is actually a different model than the last set of plugs I worked on to this amount. That's beautiful. So the wire actually comes through here and the ends go into these screw terminals. So we want to cut the sheathing about here. Remember the trick now. I nicked one of the conductors but that should be okay. What you do is you bend the wire which stretches the sheathing so then you can slice it very precisely with the knife. Okay. Do not need the piece of string. There is no need to wire this up to any conductor. We do need to strip these wires. Okay, and do not tin these. You don't tin wires that go into screw terminals. It is important to wire them up to the right ones. And luckily they are labelled. Yeah, this is a different model of plug than my other Swiss mains plugs. I don't like this one nearly as much. The other model I've had, the screws went in this way and the wires went straight in like that. It was very convenient. Live is black and goes here. And of course anybody British will notice no fuse. The Swiss do not fuse their plugs. White which is neutral goes in that one. Green which is earth. Okay. I knew which ones they were because it is in fact labelled on the plug. Except now I notice that this thing will go in either way up. Yes, yes, okay. I was suddenly worried that I had the thing in backwards. And I got my live and my neutral the wrong way around. That fits in like this. I just opened the cable relief. I'd like a piece of thinner wire for this. But I don't have any so this is what we've got. This is 10 amp. The most of the wire I have which is like 5 or 3 amp is unearthed. So it's just live and neutral. But the whole point of this exercise was to wire up the earth. And that goes on here. I said, yeah, okay. That's not a great piece of design. The post that holds it together goes right where the wires should go. I am not keen on the Swiss plugs. I do prefer the British ones. Stupidly over designed they might be. But elegant and easy to use and easy to work with. They are also... All right. Well, here is the RCD. So this plug in, this plugs into the mains. And I suppose we need to try to see. All right then. Let's get that set up and have a go. Okay, so here is a junk board from the junk drawer. And let's see if I can get some components off it. And what should I start with? Well, here is... I can actually use this. Let's take this off. This is a fuse holder. And I want this for something else. So what is this fuse anyway? 250 volts P6.3A, 6.3 amps. That seems a lot. Well, so it's these joints here. So this thing should be hot. So what we do is we push it down onto this. It melts the joint. We plunge it and it pulls the solder off. The component actually fell off the board. Hmm. Who did that? What is that? Oh, it's a massive power transistor. Okay, well this is working fine. Perfect. Yeah, this thing... I mean, electrically dubious it may be, but it's so effective. If I can use those big power transistors. What else is there that I can plausibly take off? Well, there's a bit connected here. These are always useful. So I'm not going to show that bit of footage, but I also have this STM32 thing. And I got the wrong one. I ordered 10 of these and I ended up with 10 with headers soldered onto them and I wanted 10 without. So I was thinking of trying to desolder the pins, but I don't think that the desoldering tool will work with these. I think that these are too small. There we go. It just drops off the board. So elegant. What is there on this that might be useful? I'm going to remove one of those big power transistors because they've actually got lots of connections. So let's see if that works. Dub to plunge. I've got most of these. As opposed to the solder off. This is a more complicated thing. It's got most of the solder off, but not quite enough. There's always a little bit holding it on. Okay, that's actually too warm to touch. Yeah. So it's not quite as successful with this component just because it's more complex. But it has got most of the solder off. Okay. That was a little bit of solder that fell out of the nozzle, to be honest. Yeah. The nozzle is actually full of solder. There's obviously a little bit of work to do with figuring out... figuring this thing out. There we go. There's the component. Good and warm. Probably still working though. Yeah, it's effective. I'll just try and take one of these big caps off. Let's see how that goes. Because that's a really big joint. It should work pretty well at this one. Yeah, the Pro Tools have vacuum pumps. So you don't need to plunge them. Let's use a little bit of... work on this joint. A bit of stray solder. Also, I think this is actually fastened on with something else somewhere. Oh yeah, it was actually glued down. That didn't help. But yeah, that comes off, no trouble. That is a 330 microparode monster electrolytic. Which I probably should not use in any modern piece of electronics. Let's just throw away. There you have it. Not live. Fully working. Still somewhat dubious. Hopefully less dubious. I have edited out so much from this video. I went through multiple iterations of trying to get this bloody joint working. The current one is bad, but it's going to work. Yeah. Effective, cheap, not particularly safe. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video. Please let me know what you think in the comments. And now that I have this working again I have other projects I can work on. So, more videos should show up soon. Ow! That bit's hard.