soldering tweeters

Archived from groups: rec.audio.tech (More info?)

A good question that I've always asked myself. Hope to see an answer
soon. In the mean time, use a heat sink on the wire your soldering. I
use hospital style hemostats clipped to the wire to bleed off excess
heat. Radio Shack sells inexpensive clips in their soldering section.

Archived from groups: rec.audio.tech (More info?)

In <j7%Cd.93940$Q_2.44367@fe09.lga>, on 01/05/05
at 06:45 PM, troll <troll@nospam.net> said:

>Proper Soldering Technique:

>Apply solder iron tip to what needs to be soldered, to heat it up and
>then apply solder to the heated surface, which melts the solder and
>accepts it. NOT melt solder and apply that to an unheated surface.

>Tweeters usually have leads that accept aircraft clips and these are
>usually attached to the tweeters voice coil by single leads, that come
> off the voice coil windings. i.e. They are the ends of the voice
>coils.

>Is heating the leads to the point where they will accept solder bad,
>in that the thin wire leading back to the voice coil get too hot and
>damage the voice coil?

The tweeter wire are very small and fragile. Mechanical bending or
nicking with strippers, cutters, pliers, tweezers, etc. can set you up
for a future failure as flexing or temperature changes further stresses
the wire.

Be as fast as possible with the soldering operation. The solder
actually forms a solid solution with the copper. If you keep the
connection hot long enough and supply enough solder, the tiny copper
wires will seem to dissapear (dissolved by the solder). The future
failure will often occur at or near the edge of the tinned area. This
is probably due to mechanical damage at that point, but it could also
be due to the reduced copper concentration resulting in a less
malleable wire.

Nowadays, most people use iron plated copper soldering iron tips. Iron
is not as solder soluble as copper and the tips last much longer. Once
the iron is gone, however, the copper is quickly gutted and you are
left with a hollow iron shell for a tip. If you dig around, you can
find solder that is kinder to your soldering iron ("Sav-a-bit" comes to
mind as a trade name, but my memory is foggy). These solders have some
copper already included. I've never used them and I wonder, if they are
already close to copper saturation, why would they be any good for
soldering copper wires?

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