Today is Tuesday! Today I learned how to solder for the first time! It was harder than it looked though. First we practiced water droplet shapes with the solder (My class calls them Hershey Kisses). It was quite challenging. We had to make sure that they weren’t over heater, weren’t under heated, didn’t have too much solder, weren’t low and bumpy and weren’t crossing over places. We had to make sure that we were wearing safety goggles and had a heat mat under our solder iron and a place for it. The circuit boards were quite small so we had to get the hang of holding the iron and the solder. You had to make sure that you don’t hold the solder in the iron for too long. You had to make sure that the solder didn’t touch the iron, it had to be touching the metal borders around the circles on the circuit board. This is so the heat is conducted and transferred to the solder wire.

To do a successful ‘Hershey Kiss’ you had to hold the soldering iron on the circuit board with the solder wire for about three seconds and then lift it in a gentle upward motion to maintain the point at the tip. (That was my friend’s very helpful advice!)

Don’t worry if you try it and don’t get it the first time because it took me a while to get the hang of it and do ONE successful ‘Hershey Kiss’. I still haven’t gotten the hang of it, but I really want to keep practicing.

Another skill we learned in the lesson was how to construct a circuit on the circuit board. To do this we needed to find the positive and negative side of the board and make sure that our energy was being transformed from positive to negative. It took me a bit of time to figure out how to successfully structure a circuit with the pieces we had. To do it we had a switch, a resistor, a battery, positive (red) and negative (black) wires as well as a light bulb. We did encounter another problem with this process. Our solder iron didn’t have a hot spot where it was meant to (or at all!). We had to wait a while for a solder iron to become free but by the time we found one, it was the end of the lesson! I hope I improve my soldering skills and learn more about circuits in the next Tuesday lesson!