Soldering is something where bad tools do genuinely make it extremely hard to do a good job. I used my dad's old soldering iron for a while, where it just plugs into the wall and gets hot, with no other temperature control than (I assume) some kind of thermal switch to stop it melting. I always hated soldering with that thing, and my joints looked awful. Then I got a pinecil, and my experience changed completely. Super cheap, heats up in seconds, does perfect soldering, and makes everything so much more fun and easy. Heavily recommend if you want to solder but are having problems with your existing iron https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-solde...

To each their own. I find soldering (with a nice iron!) very therapeutic, much like knitting. I'll put on a good album or catch up with some friends on the phone.

If you're impatient, plenty of fab houses (like JLCPCB) will do all the soldering for you, for about 0.1 cents per SMD joint or 2 cents per THT joint...

When i was in college I was soldering something really small (don't remember what it was) and flicked molten solder right in to the tear duct on the inside corner of one of my eyes. Not fun but didn't hurt anything permanently.

Thanks for all the advice! For context, this poem was only partially about soldering. It's also about questions regarding ever-progressing technology on Earth, which I think some caught on to. I did use solder paste and a heat gun with a fume extractor after writing this poem. :)

Of all the threads to not have a single bad comment!

(as of 11:10pm PST 2026-05-11, I hasten to add)

Any tips on how to improve soldering? I just started learning electronics, it’s so fun with Claude doing the code for the device.

Soldering is fun, especially if you designed the circuit and the pcb yourself. It's like putting together your own frankenstein, with a huge amount of anticipation toward when you finally get to give it power. Just be sure to get the polarity right on those electrolytic caps ;-)

Soldering was my favorite part of ee course in the university… i even kinda liked the fume..

So get yourself a solder fume extractor? There's plenty cheap ones to pick from.

Whatever happened to wire wrapping? That used to be a viable alternative.