Learning to Solder: Beginner’s Guide and Resources

A growing collection of soldering resources for beginners, including a shopping list of gear, tutorial videos, and starter project ideas. This page collects what I have found useful while teaching myself to solder for retro hardware repairs.

Shopping List

Essential Gear

Soldering iron or soldering station — a temperature-controlled station in the 60W+ range is much easier to learn with than a cheap fixed-heat pencil iron. Look for one with easily replaceable tips (chisel tips around 2–3mm cover most through-hole work).
Solder wire — 0.5–0.8mm diameter, rosin core. Leaded 60/40 or 63/37 is the easiest to learn with (wash your hands after use); lead-free is the modern standard but needs higher temperatures and is less forgiving.
Brass tip cleaner or wet sponge — keeps the tip clean and tinned. A brass wool cleaner is less thermally shocking than a wet sponge.
Solder sucker (desoldering pump) — for undoing mistakes and removing through-hole components.
Desoldering braid (solder wick) — complements the sucker and is essential for cleaning up pads.
Flux pen or paste — makes solder flow properly and fixes most wetting problems on older joints.
Helping hands or a PCB holder — holds the board steady so you can focus on technique.
Flush cutters — for trimming component leads after soldering.
Safety glasses — flux can spit and leads can fly when clipped.

Nice to Have

Fume extractor or desk fan — keeps flux fumes away from your face.
Magnifying glass or loupe — helps inspect joints for bridges and cold solder.
Hot air rework station — only needed later for surface-mount work and removing multi-pin chips.
Multimeter — useful for continuity checks and verifying repairs before powering on.

Videos to Watch

EEVblog #180 — Soldering Tutorial Part 1 — the classic beginner tutorial on through-hole soldering technique. Start here.
EEVblog #183 — Soldering Tutorial Part 2 (Surface Mount) — a follow-up covering surface-mount soldering basics.
How to Solder Correctly — Adafruit — a short, clear demonstration of good joint technique.
Collin’s Lab: Soldering — Adafruit — companion written guide with close-up photos.
Retro Repairs soldering streams — watch experienced repairers recap old motherboards; great for seeing real-world repairs.

Projects

Beginner Projects

LED blinky kits — cheap “learn to solder” kits with a handful of resistors and LEDs. Perfect first boards; practice heating the pad and the lead together.
555 timer circuits — small kits that produce sound or flashing patterns. A good step up from LEDs.
Practice PCB kits — blank practice boards sold purely for repetition. Great for building muscle memory without risking real gear.

Intermediate Projects

Recap an old motherboard — replacing bulging or leaking capacitors is a rite of passage in retro computing. Start on dead boards before touching hardware you care about. Machines like the one in My Old Computer often need exactly this work.
Replace a broken DC jack — a very common laptop and console repair that is easier than it looks.
Wire up a Raspberry Pi or Arduino project — headers, buttons, and LEDs on perfboard.

Longer-Term Projects

Keyboard or controller mods — swapping switches or installing LEDs in game controllers.
Repairing retro expansion cards — Sound Blaster, network cards, and video cards from the Socket A era often just need new capacitors. Pair the repair with the software setup in Various Methods for Running Windows 98.

My Old Computer — restoring an AMD Sempron 2500+ PC, including hardware that may need soldering work.
Various Methods for Running Windows 98 — what to install once the hardware is repaired.