Soldering wires 101

Recently, a friend of mine taught me how to properly solder wires together. It's not a big deal really, but being able to connect wires together and make it strong enough that I can pull them apart by hand was enough to give me confidence to tackle one area of automotive work that I've always tried hard to avoid doing my self. Wiring. It's something that I could do if I had to, but never at a level that I'd personally be happy about so I'd always just have someone else do it. but now, things are different and I've been happily redoing the wiring on the '79 myself for the last few days.

Anyway, I figured it'd be nice to do a write up on how to solder wires together properly.

But before that, check out his shot from my early days of working on cars... This is how I used to wire stuff together.

It's painful to look at, and in fact it looks downright scary, I'd call it a fire hazard (Remember to always have a fire extinguisher on board, no matter how well the wiring was done). The solder connections look like boogers, and if memory serves me right, had to be very careful handling this because it had a tendency to fall apart. haha.

Now, how to properly joint the wires together. It's pretty simple really. As long as you understand what the solder is supposed to do. Simply twist the wires together lightly, make sure it's snug, but there is enough space so that when you melt the solder it will flow in between the strands of wire to the other side and form a nice solid bond.

For this you will need a powerful soldering iron. What I use now is a 100w unit so that it heats up fast and quickly melts all the solder. Before, when I had no clue what any of this was, I was using a puny 25w soldering iron... It was so crappy that a roll of solder was actually more expensive than the thing!

With the wires twisted together, use the soldering iron to heat the wire itself, not the solder so that when you touch the solder on the wire it will melt and be absorbed into the wire all the way to the other side.

The finished product; 

After it cools, a good tug on the wire will confirm that the connection is solid. 

Using the same technique you can also solder on terminals, getting the solder to fill up where the end of the wire contacts with the terminal. 

It's a small thing really, but makes me happy that I get to learn something new once in a while. See how much my wiring has improved? 

Maybe someday, I'll learn how to do a cleaner wire tuck. :D