Soldering Tips

There are many soldering tips available, but you typically don't need more than two. For surface mount work, you need to get a soldering tip with a pointed end. Try to avoid the ones with a long cone. The length of the cone delays temperature feedback and leads to long response time and over shooting. In other words, get a short soldering tip that has a pointed end.

Metcal sells soldering tips that are prebent 30 degrees or so. This is a good idea. First, a bent tip makes it easier to access tight space and work under a +3.0 dioptor magnifying glass. This is because a bent tip makes it unnecessary to tilt the soldering pencil itself. Second, a bent tip also makes it easy to ``knife'' or ``slide'' solder fine pitch leads of surface mount components. More on this topic later.

Besides a find-tipped soldering tip, you may also want to consider getting a standard tip. Most soldering stations come with standard tips already, so you probably don't need to spend any extra money. A standard tip is bigger and more blunt. This type of tips is useful for general-purposed soldering and it is more effective when the amount of heat mass to heat up is large (due to the larger contact area).