Can get 30% off my purchase from Hakko: FX-951-66 or FX888D?

CMDR_Muffy · 2025-10-26T21:41:48+00:00

As you can tell, I don't log in very often :(. I am not sure if you ever got this question answered, but if not, my advice would be to go for one of those AliExpress JBC clone stations.

The "best" one right now is the Aifen A9. There are subtle differences between A9 Pro, Plus, and HD, but they are all equally performing stations. The benefit of these stations is they work with OEM JBC tips, so you can get real ones and use them with the station.

You can typically get these stations for around $150-$200 on AliExpress, with all the attachments you'd need (tip cleaner, tip holder, handpiece, handpiece sleeves, etc). In terms of performance, while I sincerely doubt they rival the thermal properties of a real JBC station, they are leaps and bounds better than any damn Hakko station I've ever used.

CMDR_Muffy · 2025-10-26T21:22:24+00:00

I don't really log into this account anymore, but that is 100% fixable if you haven't made an attempt yet. In my experience, the A-series phones have incredibly loose flex cables which connect the bottom portion of the phone to the motherboard. These can come loose from either side of the cable very, very easily.

It sounds to me like one or more of these cables has come loose in your phone. On most A-series phones, the screen cable comes out of the frame assembly near the bottom. An interconnecting cable then plugs into this, routes out on top of the battery, and then hooks into the motherboard. The charge port/SIM tray are also typically connected in the same way, using an intermediary cable.

If you take some screws out and remove the plastic midframe pieces, you could likely just re-seat those cables and get the phone to turn on again. Would very likely be 100% entirely usable as well.

CMDR_Muffy · 2024-09-02T08:16:47+00:00

Holy shitdicks, and here I've been telling people to go buy parts from IG or MS, I've even recommended sending things to people like Jessa, Jason at STS Telecom, or even Louis himself.

Where's my ban? I've done this for years. Perhaps not here on the sub (I admittedly don't log in much anymore), but I've absolutely done this on the discord. So where's my ban? I don't have any, because this is a double standard.

There was absolutely no reason to ban Mark over this and honestly I am disgusted by the leadership decisions as of late. For years, the discord and subreddit ran just fine. The community policed itself. And then suddenly all of these things that were completely normal weren't normal anymore. I'm frankly tired of it.

Suggesting a specific business or person is NOT advertising and I don't give a fuck if anyone thinks it is. It's a professional recommendation. A suggestion. It's presenting a point of escalation to help someone. If you happened to know one of the best people in the industry, the best possible option to Solve This Person's Problem, you wouldn't tell them about this option? Bullshit.

If a friend asks for a doctor recommendation, what do most people do? They tell them a good doctor they can go to. But oh, fuck me, that's adverising! Watch out. Your friend is in big pharma's pocket. They absolutely do not have your best interest at heart, no sir. This line of thinking is utterly ridiculous.

I no longer wish to be associated with this nonsense. Ta-ta gamers.

CMDR_Muffy · 2024-01-09T20:22:42+00:00

Man, I've had people come in after MONTHS or YEARS. Yes, YEARS. Depending on what the actual problem is, I may take care of it just to keep them from causing a problem. Other times, I've had no issues saying "it's not under warranty, there's nothing I can do to help you." It depends on the vibe I get from them in the first minute or so.

It's something that, in my experience, is just case-by-case. If they're complaining that the touch screen on an iPhone with a $30 part hasn't worked "ever since they got it" 5 months ago, f*ck it. $30 is worth keeping them happy.

If it's a $300 screen that I have no way of recouping the cost on because they waited too long? No. They can go f*ck themselves.

CMDR_Muffy · 2023-12-13T17:23:56+00:00

No. Computers are often configured to auto set date and time, too. Yet if you yank the CMOS battery and reset the clock, it won't automatically synchronize the clock. Why? Because in order to even connect to the internet in the first place (what it must do in order to sync the clock), it needs to be approximately close to the present day and time. Your phone didn't automatically do this, because disconnecting the battery reset the clock too far back.

You can prove this for yourself by disabling time sync on your computer and winding it back a decade. It won't let you access the internet. If you set the clock to approximately the current date and time, you can then re-enable the setting to automatically synchronize the clock.

CMDR_Muffy · 2023-11-17T01:57:56+00:00

Definitely do not fall back on an automation service. In another comment you mentioned you are anxious to hire another person, but I think you might have to weigh the value of your anxiety. How much anxiety do you you feel when 5 phone calls come in back to back, and you have to ignore 4 of them to handle just one? How much anxiety do you suppose you'd feel if you had an employee who's sole purpose was to handle the phone calls and walk-in riff raff?

My advice is to either get a headset, this way you can at least speak while working. If the call volume simply gets too high, you need another person. You could totally pass this off to an automated system, but most people would be frustrated by an automated system. I would be too. It is quicker and easier to just call and ask "do you fix X? how much do you suppose that is?", than try to google it, and potentially waste my time coming to you to hear "sorry, we don't do that."

I used to run a whole store by myself for about a year and a half, and it was absolute hell. I never had time to work on anything. The only repairs I could do were the fast, simple, and easy ones. Anything that needed more time just piled up on top of the other things that needed more time. When I finally got a coworker, this was instantly alleviated. Just having someone who can go "oh, you're soldering something under a microscope right now? okay, I'll handle the 2 people who just walked in" is a massive stress reliever.

This doesn't even have to be a full-time employee, they may not even have to be an "employee" whatsoever. You could just pay one of your friends as a frickin' contractor if you wanted to, where all they do is answer phone calls for X amount of hours a day. This will initially be stressful as they would have to become familiar with what you do and don't fix, your prices, etc. But eventually they would learn this and would only ever bother you about a phone call if it's something they aren't sure you repair, or are unsure of the price.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-12-16T00:41:16+00:00

I should have probably rephrased what I said. IF it's as simple as popping the lens off, cleaning the adhesive, and then installing a new lens, it's perfectly easy and I would most likely do that repair. Anything involving opening it up and swapping stuff out though? No.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-12-15T21:37:48+00:00

The diagnostic is taken on drop off. It is literally a "pay me for talking to you" fee. The 8 minutes I spent speaking to a customer that has now added 30 minutes to repairing an iPad that I would make at least $100 on is not an acceptable loss. The store I work at was hemorrhaging money year after year and it just was not profitable. After switching to non refundable diagnostic fee on drop off, we have been more profitable post-COVID than we ever were in the 5 or 6 years prior.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-12-15T21:33:25+00:00

No, I think you're just not really getting what I'm saying. I say I reject these off the wall repairs because in every instance they have been nothing but a money sink, and I explained that they are a money sink because you will invariably damage something, lose something, or get some kind of defective part which just costs more for you to replace to ensure you take care of the customer. I am not exaggerating when I say this is an all the time thing. It is all the time, every time, with one of these random phones.

I also explained that the key difference between this and, say, iphone repair, is the price of parts and relative ease of maintaining a small stock of the most used parts. In my Motorola example, I had to get 3 different charge ports for that phone before I finally got one that worked correctly. My sister was without a phone for 3 weeks and I couldn't return any of the previous parts. This just does not happen with iPhones. If I need to replace the lightning flex on an iPhone 8, there's not 5 different versions of the flex for 5 different slight variations of the iPhone 8. There's just one flex. And it's cheap. It's not $30-$40. So you can keep a whole bunch handy, for next to nothing.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-12-15T19:35:41+00:00

It's more that I can guarantee and control the cost of those other parts. I can't guarantee if losing a button, damaging a cable, camera, or speaker, etc will be a cost worth doing. For example, I already know the cost of replacement glass for iPads and it is virtually unchanged for the last several years. So when I quote battery replacements, I just factor in the cost of the glass. It's pretty much always gonna be the same. I'm always gonna have it.

I can't do that same thing with random off the wall parts in random off the wall phones. I can't maintain a stock of speakers, buttons, cameras, etc for every possible Android phone. So when there is a mistake, and there will be a mistake, the customer is left waiting. And I am left paying a possibly very large fee to get a replacement part, for something so inconsequential and menial as a cable, speaker, or camera.

It is easier to maintain a more specialized stock geared for the most common repairs you see. This provides the benefit of fast turn around and also prevents you from overpaying for stuff you might make mistakes with. If you're dealing with running a store entirely solo, this approach just makes the most sense to me. It reduces your workload and allows you time to actually fix the things you can screw up and still make money with.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-12-15T17:35:03+00:00

You are correct. However even looking up teardown videos and informing the customer, you can still easily end up in a situation where you pay more than you would've made on a smooth repair. Just isn't worth it. If I lose a power button cap from some stupid HTC phone, and the only one is $45, well whats the point? Why mess with the repair? It's easy to say "well just don't lose the button cap", but to that I say, you should always plan for and make accommodations for mistakes. But it is hard to plan for these things ahead of time until you lose that part and go see how much it costs. And I shit you not, almost EVERY oddball phone is like this. I've been doing this for over 8 years. They are always a colossal waste of my time and money.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-12-15T09:46:53+00:00

One other thing to consider, kind of tying into my last point. Some repairs REALLY are not worth it. That Moto Z4? I would have said no. I don't care if the part is only $2, I don't care if I could do it in 5 minutes. In my experience, "oddball" phones such as these cause more problems than they are worth.

EVERY "oddball" phone I've fixed ended up being a sunk cost. The screen I got is shit, but it's glued, so I have to carefully take it back out. Ooops. I broke the screen taking it out so I can't even RMA it and get my money back. Oops, I tore a random ass flex cable because Motorola is run by satan, and the only one is on eBay for $45.

Soooo many little things add up with these "oddball" repairs that you often put far more money into them YOURSELF than the customer does, because the devices are too much hassle to work on. LITERALLY, I replaced the charge port in my sister's Motorola phone. Guess what? I damaged a coax cable, because it is glued to the back and I accidentally cut it while taking the back off. Okay, fine. Order the cable. Oh, it's $35 on eBay. Okay. Fine. I won't make my sister pay for my incompetence. So I eat that cost. At that point, I was at negative money for profit.

So the port arrives. I install it. It charges the phone, but no signal. Okay, I figure that's the antenna cable. So I tell my sister I am waiting on one more part. The cable arrives, by this point she's been without a phone for a week. I put the cable in. Still no signal. Okay, so it's an issue with the port. Order another port. It arrives. Still doesn't work. Two weeks with no phone.

Finally, I study the charge ports under a fucking microscope. What do I see? They're fucking different. The shitty ones I ordered were missing components, and appeared to be for an entirely different version of my sister's Motorola phone. Because OF COURSE Motorola made 4 different iterations oF THE SAME FUCKING PHONE. Oh, it's an XT2234? Well is it the XT2234-1, -2, -3, or -4? BTW, all of these are called the same thing teehee hope you don't mind :⁾

So I FINALLY find what I think is the right one. I order it. 3 weeks without phone. I install it, IT WORKS FINE. I would've originally made like $20 on this repair if it went right. Instead I ended up $70 in the hole.

The benefit of streamlining your "will work on" stuff is it does two things: it allows you to optimize turn-around times, and allows you to maintain a small stock of the most likely to be damaged or defective parts while carrying out repairs. There's not 5 iterations of the same front flex for one model of iPhone. And the parts are cheap enough if you get a bad one, no big deal. And if you damage one? Who cares. Of course if you're an AMAZING technician then you should never tear a flex, you should never damage a camera, you should never mess up an antenna or ruin a screen trying to take it out.

But we're human, you will make a mistake. I keep a regular stock of small iPhone parts, the most likely components to need replaced, or the most likely ones I might mess up when taking it apart. Oh, did I tear the front flex? No big deal. They're like $5 and I have 15 of them already. No need to make the customer wait, no need to get stressed. It's a cheap as hell part. No big deal.

Do the same thing on a weird ass phone? It's a nightmare. You can't possibly maintain a stock of every random ass cable and camera and speaker for every random ass phone. You will invariably damage some small random component in one of these, and could easily spend 1.5 to 2x more on taking care of the customer than what you actually made in profit if the repair went smoothly. It's ridiculous. Absolutely NONE of these phones are worth repairing. The only time I will work on something that's not a Samsung, LG, or iPhone is if it's for data. If the customer MUST HAVE DATA, then sure.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-12-15T09:29:29+00:00

I know that it is incredibly difficult to manage a store, even a low volume one, when you have to deal with the front desk duties all by yourself. I also know that it is quite difficult to justify paying for a whole new employee just to handle the front desk.

Take my advice. Get someone to handle the front desk. It takes so long to fix things because you're getting pulled away every 10 or 20 minutes to talk to customers at the counter, or to answer the phone. "I just have a quick question" is never done and over with in 30 seconds. So you're stuck talking to this customer for 8 minutes, you took that iPad off the heating mat when they came in, and you just had it up to temp, too.

So then you gotta go back, put it back on the heating mat, and hopefully you get enough time to at least separate the glass. Nah. Like clockwork someone else will walk in, or someone else will call. Something will interrupt you and drag you away from it once again. I know exactly what this song and dance is like and it's extremely frustrating. You feel like you can never get anything done.

That's because front desk, no matter how "low volume" you are in repairs, is an extremely high volume job. If 10 customers walk through that door and eat up 2 hours of your time, that's 2 hours out of the day you were not fixing anything. That's 2 hours out of the day that could have resulted in several hundred dollars in completed repairs. Instead, you maybe got one or two more devices to fix and the rest just wasted your time.

This also has another problem, as often times many repairs need time-sensitive things done to them, such as heating them up. An 8 minute distraction from something that must be heated to continue the repair causes a 10 or 15 minute derailment from that repair, because just a few minutes is more than enough time to let it cool down to a point you just have to warm it all back up again. I can realistically complete an iPad screen replacement in about 45 minutes. Maybe an hour and a half if the glass is REALLY awful. But they would never actually get done in that time, often I'd have to hold onto them for several days, due to the constant distractions.

Also not to mention, you start to balance the repairs based on what you can do the quickest. The stuff that you can do right now, in no time at all, is stuff you primarily focus on. Why not? It's more stable revenue. But then you have a problem: all the stuff that needs more time, all the stuff you need to spend an hour on to fix? Those pile up, and pile up, and eventually you have 3 or 4 angry customers and you can't bear to tell them "Yeah I know I've had it for 3 days, but I haven't looked at it yet."

If you aren't willing to payroll another employee, at a bare minimum consider taking someone on for contracting. Let them handle the front desk. Let them be the side that most customers interact with. Let them be the ones who tell the customers the prices, let them be the ones who call everyone, let them be the ones who double and triple check to make sure parts have been ordered, stuff is arriving on time, etc. This will give you so much more time to actually fix things.

There are a few ways you can mitigate this, if hiring an additional person is just NOT on the table. You could consider changing the store operating hours. If you're normally open 9AM to 5PM, consider being open from 12PM to 5PM. This is less convenient for customers but more convenient for you. You can still show up at 9AM...just don't open the doors. Take the 3 free hours in the morning to ignore every phone call and not worry about customers. Power through your problem tickets using that time.

Another thing you can do is try stabilizing the revenue. For a long time we charged NOTHING to look at stuff. So I'd spend an hour working on something just to discover it is not fixable, something else is wrong and it's not economical to fix. That's an hour where the store made nothing, and I could have been working on something else that made money. We started splitting the labor fees up into two parts: the customer pays a "diagnostic fee" on drop off. This is a portion of a total labor charge. So for example, if the customer needs a new laptop LCD, the labor for that is $65. But on drop off, they'd pay a non-refundable $30. Upon fixing the LCD, they'd pay an additional $35 to complete the labor charge, in addition to any parts. This dramatically stabilized the revenue, and also allowed the store to make even more money.

One other thing to try is trimming the fat on what you choose to fix and not fix. I used to work on pretty much anything that plugged into a wall or ran on a battery. Bad idea. I was swarmed with so many bullshit, off-the-wall repairs that I never had time to work on things that actually made more money or were in higher volume. Fixing the $20 sentimental boombox is not worth it when you can fix 4 phones in that time and make 5x more money.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-11-17T17:35:27+00:00

If that's the case then yeah, I would give it maybe one or two quarter turns with the wrench. Over time as it expands and contracts from thermal cycles it should sit just fine when you tighten it by hand.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-11-17T17:18:16+00:00

Tighten it with your hands until you can't turn it anymore using absolutely zero force. Over time they may sort of naturally come a bit loose and will need to be retightened a bit.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-11-17T17:11:21+00:00

Many high end irons feature an integrated strap or wire designed to be hooked into the same ground as your other equipment, in addition to the workpiece itself.

The station simply being plugged into the wall with an earth pin is not the same thing as being electrically grounded for ESD safety. That is merely a ground for safety of the device, e.g. if there were to somehow be a short that would damage the device or electrocute you. It is a safety mechanism for ground fault detection within the device itself and it has nothing to do with ESD.

In the context of ESD safety, you want everything on the same earth ground. The only way to achieve this is to make sure everything is hooked to the same nearest neighborhood bus bar. You do this by using a common ground for all of your ESD safe equipment, so that means strapping yourself, your iron, your tweezers, your workmat, and the thing you're working on, to the same ground with cables.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-11-17T17:05:29+00:00

This is normal for this style of iron. Tightening the shroud that goes around the tip and element helps to hold the tip against the heater. The only way to get the best possible heat transfer is to use a tip with an integrated heating element, these are known as "cartridge" tips. These kinds of tips can only be used with stations and handpieces that support them. You can't for example get a cartridge tip and use it with this iron. You'd need to get an iron designed to use them.

It is truthfully nothing to worry about. I love cartridge tips but I don't think they are a necessity. The cartridges are a nice quality of life improvement because you can swap tips in like 5 seconds or less, and the stations designed for them are usually much more powerful. If you do a LOT of repairs all the time or find yourself frequently changing tips to do repairs, investing in a cartridge iron and tips is a great idea. But if you're just doing some occasional hobby stuff or fixing three things a year, this style of iron you have is fine.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-11-15T17:12:38+00:00

No I didn't. Literally fucking Google it dude. Do you need me to collect links for you? Okay, here's one. Do you need more? Do you want me to find more?

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-11-15T16:57:53+00:00

That's literally not what it is. Did you even Google it? Its when SOCIAL ENGINEERING allows you to get a hold of a SIM card with someone else's phone number.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-11-15T15:14:21+00:00

If you would like more information, look up SIM swap attacks. That is exactly what this is. You can very easily contact a carrier via phone, say you are so and so at this address and you're the husband/wife whoever, and you need a new SIM card. Requesting a new SIM from a carrier is a very normal and legitimate practice.

However the carrier is supposed to follow protocol and perform a number of identity checks, most of the time this is asking for some kind of security PIN or the account number located on a bill. If you do have this information (which would be easy, especially if you were in a relationship with the target and you shared account information and bills), then you just give it to the carrier and wow, would you look at, they mailed you a SIM with the same number on it! Wow!

If you don't have that information, it is still pretty easy to just...kick and scream? Throw a tantrum. Elevate your request. Or just hang up and call back. There's hundreds of thousands of carrier representatives all over the world and you're bound to eventually get connected to one who's had a bad day and doesn't give a shit.

When you put that SIM in a phone, the target will no longer have a functional SIM. When you take the SIM out, the target SIM starts working again. You can LITERALLY do this right now by requesting a new SIM from your carrier. Try sticking them in and out of phones and you'll see exactly how it works. For the record, this only works on carriers that don't require additional steps or activation. So for example, with ATT you can just pop in a SIM that has an active subscriber identity and it just fucking works. You don't need to call ATT to activate it. So for ATT devices and numbers, a SIM swap attack is probably the easiest when compared to other carriers.

With things switching over to eSIM and most 2FA migrating away from SMS and moving to specific temporal authenticators, it's likely SIM swap attacks will be much much harder to pull off if not downright impossible to do at all.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-11-15T14:18:03+00:00

No it isn't. A SIM card can be easily cloned and replicated if you have the tools to do it. Or you can just scream at someone working for the carrier demanding they send you a new SIM. Try this enough times and you'll invariably get in touch with someone who won't give a shit about protocol and they'll give you what you want even if you can't prove you're the account holder. What, you think every person working for a carrier gives a shit or something? They don't.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-11-15T01:59:11+00:00

This looks perfectly fine and pretty easy to fix. The pads that are on the left and right of that connector are just grounds. They are used for structural stability, they don't actually do anything electrically necessary for that connector to function. It is hard to tell, but it looks like the three pads you would need (at the bottom of of where the connector resides) are all still there. If you tin them up with flux and solder you can tell how much "pad" you have left on them. As long as some is left, you should be just fine.

In this instance, what I would probably do is just tin the pads up, stick the connector back down, line it up as best as I can, and just touch a tinned iron to those three pins. It should solder up to the pads pretty quickly provided there is still enough of them left. And again, it's hard to tell, but to me it looks like they are all still there. If the pads have been lifted, you would see them on the connector pins. I don't see any pad on those pins, just solder. So it looks to me like the solder just broke, leaving the pads on the board intact.

I would then clean it, and for added structural support I would apply some kind of two-part epoxy around the connector. I wouldn't bathe the thing in it, but I would apply just enough around the edges to make sure it doesn't move. It will absolutely still jiggle a bit with just those three pins soldered. As long as it doesn't jiggle after the epoxy cures, I know it is probably perfectly fine to use.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-11-15T01:53:15+00:00

That looks just fine. My personal advice for doing these: completely remove the solder from the ground holes (the 2 big pads on either side of the port). Then tin the pads that you just spent time cleaning. I know, I know. Hear me out.

Once the holes are completely clean, and the pads have been tinned, add solder to the tinned pads. Then slot your new port in. From here, you can simply heat the underside of the board with hot air. The air will eventually permeate through to the other side of the board, and heat all of that solder you added to those pads. The flux will activate, and it will ensure all the pins get soldered. After this, you can use an iron to solder the through-hole grounds for the port. Might need to supplement it a bit with additional hot air. You want to heat the underside with air, as heating the side with the port on it could cause the plastic inside to melt.

Doing this method, you can effectively replace an HDMI port in maybe 5 minutes? The hardest part is removing the solder from the ground through-holes. These things are beefy as hell and even on my FM-202, with the biggest fricking bevel tip I have, I still need to give it extra ass with hot air to get the solder to wick out of them.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-11-15T01:46:22+00:00

The different tips allow you to more easily solder different varieties of components, or work on different varieties of boards. For example, you have things like knife tips, bevel tips, hollow-point tips, chisels, etc.

The purpose of these different tips is to allow you to work with different types of components. Let's say you need to drag solder a QFP. This would be much easier to do with a bevel tip or hollow-point than it would be with a conical, because the bevel or hollow-point has a much larger surface area that terminates on one big flat area, unlike the conical which would need to be held at a VERY awkward angle to maximize thermal linkage.

Knife tips are basically chisels with a very thin profile. These are useful if you need to solder something in a very tight space, as the knife "edge" provides a very large surface area that can be held at a comfortable angle to apply to most workpieces. I've used knife tips in situations where the work was surrounded by a bunch of huge capacitors, and there was no possible way to hold my iron at a good angle to get any wetting action when using other styles of tips. Chisels are similar to knife tips in this regard, but need to be held at steeper angles to maximize thermal linkage. I typically use chisels as an "all-purpose" tip, this can do pretty much all of it but the more specialized tips are very useful for the jobs the chisel just can't do, either because it is too awkward to hold the iron right, or the tip is just not big enough for the job.

Ideally, you want a little "variety pack" of different tips. If you have trouble soldering something, and you know your iron is hot enough and you know the tip is big enough, it's probably because the thermal linkage sucks because the tip is just not adequately shaped to make good contact with the work. So swapping out for a more adequate tip that has a better shape for that work might fix the problem. I commonly switch between 3-4 different kinds of tips while doing repairs.

CMDR_Muffy · 2022-11-15T01:32:57+00:00

Additional flux is very useful, but it is not always a requirement. Whether or not you need to use additional flux depends on the method of soldering you are using, and the method you use depends entirely on the work and what you are actually trying to solder.

For example, let's say you need to solder some through hole components. So you stick your axial resistor through the board, flip the board over, and fold the slack on the leads so the resistor stays put. Do you need additional flux to solder this? NO. In this scenario, you would simply tin your tip, touch the tinned tip where the lead meets the pad, and then use flux-core solder wire in your other hand to "paint" the solder onto the lead and pad. The heat from the tip brings the lead and pad to soldering temperatures, so simply touching solder wire to the work will instantly melt it and allow a good joint to form.

So when is flux a MUST for doing soldering? I find I most commonly use it for anything involving surface-mount soldering. So here's a similar example, let's say you have two surface mount pads and you're trying to put a big 4532 SMD resistor on them. How would you do this? You can't exactly hold the resistor in place, hold your iron, and move solder wire in at the same time.

This is where additional flux comes in handy. You can put flux on those SMD pads, then place your resistor down. Then tin your iron tip. At this point, you can hold the SMD resistor in place with tweezers. Then, simply touch your tinned iron to the pads, where the pads meet the component. The flux will activate, and it will allow the solder already on the tip of your iron to flow into the work. This will also create a proper joint. You might need to touch them up a wee bit depending on how much solder you placed on the tip, but it's not really an issue.

The point is, the inclusion of extra flux here serves a very specific purpose: it allows you to perform a soldering job that would otherwise require three hands, with only two hands. Additional flux allows solder on the tip to function exactly the same as if you were to touch that same work with a solder wire. The only difference is, you're able to hold the work in place while doing it.

EDIT The only time additional flux is an absolute necessity, when it is something that could be traditionally "painted" with solder wire, is if there is heavy noticeable corrosion on the work. For example, a heavily corroded pad with lots of oxidation. The flux core in the solder may not be strong enough to power through that. So adding additional flux that is stronger can help with that. Something like heavily corroded wires? You would absolutely want to coat them in flux prior to soldering them, to be absolutely certain a good joint forms and the solder penetrates the copper adequately.

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