Soldering Class
On Thurs March 15, we held our first JSCARC hosted Soldering 101 class. Actually, it was a practice kit building project which included soldering discrete components onto a PCB. Thanks to the wonders of Ebay great deals, 225 small kits of Blinking LED lights was won for use in this type of class.
We primarily offerred this class to the new wave of students currently taking Bob’s N9RCS weekly Tech License Class. With sheepish advertising, we had a relatively good turnout of 6 students. Most incredibly, we had a great turnout of very generous mentors (Elmers) from the club which were Jeff, AB4ME, Stu W4STU, and Terry, KG5TJT. This was kind of an experiment on several levels- one was to see if we could use soldering irons without a) setting off the fire alarms; or b) leaving scorch marks on the table. Turns out that the room did not have the fancy smoke detectors, and nothing was triggerred (whew… since I forgot to bring a fan). Also, the tables in the room were metallic so there were zero opportunities to leave burn marks in the wood. Proudly, though, we cut out 2’x2′ swatches of carpet reminents from our shack reflooring rennovation. How’s that’s for great conservation/reuse story!
Special kudos to our awesome mentors. Jeff, Stu, Terry all brought soldering irons and supplies to cover for the unexpected turnout. Lessons learned– the 1 on 1 instruction teaming was great. Everyone has different levels of experience so that worked out great. As expected, part of the learning experience included a few miswires and the debug/rework. The funniest story was Terry’s experience with his student, John. Terry built a kit himself for kicks but soldered his transistors in backwards. He used this opportunity to allow his student to rework the board. Terry messed it up so badly, that his student had to rewire jumpers on the board…. but it worked! Onto the next class perhaps later this month…
View photos from this event.