HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO BE ABLE TO STACK 7135 CHIPS?I DID IT :stacked 4 each 7135's

Any suggestions on a basic soldering kit for a newb?

I’m an automotive/diesel/heavy equipment mechanic. I can rebuild engines in lawn mowers to natural gas compressors with pistons the size of 5 gallon buckets. I’ve always been really good with all things mechanical and LOVE fixing up old vehicles. One thing I learned after spending entirely too much money and time on is that I can NOT do paint and body work. As much as I wanted to learn it just wasn’t something I was good it. I ended up about driving myself nuts before I finally admitted it wasn’t for me.

It sounds like making or modding drivers is something that you just might not be good at. Don’t let it ruin a hobby you otherwise really enjoy. I haven’t been on this site long but I’m sure someone here would be happy to mod a driver for you.

I’ve yet to mod a driver in any way so I very well may end up in the same boat as you :Sp

U
You hit the. Caffeine part pretty good , Ugh my vision is where Iam suffering with my retinopathy I use prescription glasses and the magnifying glasses, I took today off to not get too obsessed with it and i have been drivers built fore I was hoping to learn how to do it myself but I’ll put it on the back burner for a while, I have to wait for 10/3 to get paid again any how’s .

This is especially true on some people, myself included. The hard thing is to not get that cup of coffee in the morning. It’s almost impossible, man :slight_smile:

Unsteady hand + small components soldering = HUGE frustrations. It would seem everything that can go wrong, would.

Anyway, LJ, this is pretty much standard for everybody. Don’t beat yourself too much of it. I’m sure I too have probably around ten lights not working right now and just KIV forever, waiting for that “right” modding moment that never comes.

If vision is an issue and you have a little bit of time and money build yourself something like this:

Edit: Just be careful where you put your hands when you are using a hot iron!

+1

Practice on junk (and it helps if parts are bigger than a flea) and throw away your mistakes free of charge. I got my 10K+ solder joints of practice many years ago before SMD technology was around. It still took a few tries to get soldering flea sized 0603 resistors and such. It takes a real steady hand to do this and your solder skills need to be top notch or you will just have a mess of solder bridge and burned parts.

SMD get a hot air reflow gun, thruhole get a good 30-60 watt temperature adjustable rig…they do even have dual units out…someone here will chime in with the correct model to get at a reasonable price I am sure

hehe, funny you should mention that…I laid my hot air gun across my middle finger on my left hand one day when building a 5*7135 SK68 Nanjg and/or working on my triple Convoy S2 (was …at 350C it melted the skin instantly…for about a month I had a huge scab, and now have a permanent “divot” in the skin on my finger

yeah…pay attention to where your hands are at (ask me how I know :P)

That’s nothing compared to my stupidity just a few months ago. I was crouched down to make a weld on a rack for my friend’s truck when I lost my balance and grabbed the hot steel pipe with my bare hand. An oval about 2” by 3” swelled up about 3/4”! That hand was useless for almost a month

Fvk’n MEYOW!!!

wow…hot welded pipe + flesh

(haha…comparing out scars and war wounds now :stuck_out_tongue: )

Lol, yep! I’m just waiting until I get to post about burning off skin or loosing an eye to my latest megalumen build. Maybe its a good thing my budget only allows for kilolumen lights! :bigsmile:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Practice does NOT make Perfect. Practice only makes permanent.

Only perfect practice makes perfect.

Whether or not you give up is up to you, but I would suggest a method that might save you some money:

Go to the dump, the trash, anywhere you can find some modern electronic toys that are “dead”. Take them apart & scrounge the littlest parts you can lay your hands on inside. Look at the driver you want to Mod and figure out what parts from the toys approximate the sizes of the good stuff.

Now get “artsy” and solder the trash parts together, or to pads on the trash circuit boards. Keep analyzing your methods and work out a way to do it with the smallest, cleanest, best solder blob possible. Use a dead toy as an example — it didn’t fail for bad solder joints! Get some serious magnification and examine your joints in the most minute detail you can muster, and compare each one critically to the ones the toys had from the factory.

This will be a good time to acquire or build tools to hold the wee parts in whatever places you want them to stay.

As often as not, you can pick up a wee droplet of solder & use that both to transfer the heat to the joint and to transfer itself as soon as the joint is hot enough for it to flow. That makes more sense in my head than it probably does to read, but you’ll see it. Carrying the solder droplet in on the tip leaves your other hand free to hold parts.

Once you can solder trash parts together in a way that looks like how it was made to start with, hold on to that method and repeat it until you can do it Every Single Time. THEN PRACTICE THAT.

You won’t be working on repairing electronics, you’ll be working on improving your soldering technique, that’s all.

Once you feel comfortable with trash, try removing what you did to your paid-for drivers, clean them up and try again with one. It may be fried already, but it won’t cost you any extra. Continue to examine your work, analyze and criticize. And strive for improvement. If you get one of your paid ones working again, share that with the family!

You can quit if you want to, but that’s what I’d do. Okay, what I DID… Yes, I’ve been soldering since Integrated Circuit referred to a race with a mix of dark- and light-skinned people in it, but when I did decide to go SMD, I found practice materials abounded in the trash.

Just a simple suggestion. Just trying to help. Hope it does.

But I’m just…

Dim

Okay, once I worked as a shop welder for a Millwright company. A friend of The Big Boss had rented a “Pan” or “Scraper” & his operator had crashed it into the blade of a ’dozer, peeling back part of what you could call the “bumper” of the Pan. It was 1/2” sheet steel, welded in sections into a pretty shape around the front of the machine… The damage was contained to one section about the size of the large half of your thigh. The shop boss cut it off & made a cardboard template & handed it to me to cut out of cold-rolled stock. I marked out my chalk outline & started my cut. The shape was tricky, and the shop boss demanded perfection, so I cut slowly & rested my torch-holding forearm on the waste. Until I turned it to cut the other side…

If you’ve ever slapped a fresh steak on a very-hot grill, you know the ‘Sssszzz’ sound it makes. I barely heard that before I realized I may not be as bright as I think I am sometimes… Then I remembered I’m extraordinarily LUCKY! It turned out, notice all the veins and arteries that you can see bulging a little on the bottom of your forearm? That was the only part that touched! It was like a lightning-bolt burn tattoo, every major blood vessel from the elbow to the edge of my glove, outlined in that white-brown colored burned skin, which ultimately healed into brown scars. It only took a few years for those to fade… The memory is as fresh today as it ever was.

I don’t think I’ll quit permanently with the 7135 chips, take a break and stick to what I can do ie spring Braiding and like CK and many other members suggested installing pretty built upgraded drivers Thank God for Mountain electronics ,and once I get a few more simple builds under my belt try like you suggested using junked electronics .However you did hit on something securing the parts together until I get a solder completed, the only thing that comes to mind is a pair of hemostats that old lumens has, do you or anyone else have any other suggestions? I tried the toothpick and super glue but I didn’t do so well with it and i don’t lime the residue build up.

I use hemostats and pointy tweezers, mostly hemostats. Curved ones usually, large and small. Also, old-school alligator clips can be helpful if you need to “clamp” a part in place, but they’re hard to find and tend to “swallow” small parts.

You can wind a rubber band around the middle of your tweezers or hemostats to give yourself a “3rd hand” with adjustable grip.

Using a piece of coat-hanger or other stiff wire, take two turns around the shaft of a Phillips-head screwdriver, then cut off & bend the ends to meet each other, bend so they fit where you need them & maybe smash the tips with a hammer or vice-grip… Dittos for the rubber band if needed. Nicest wee clamp you’ll find, since you made it to fit.

I added a section to my first reply you may also find helpful:

On your clean soldering iron tip, get a wee droplet of solder to hang off the end. Now get your part in place & use the droplet to both carry heat into the joint and to provide the solder for the joint. It will flow off the tip when the joint is hot enough. Like having a drop of paint on the tip of a brush & not wiping it off but letting it flow onto the canvas… I can’t really describe it, but you’ll see it. That will at least keep you from having to hold the solder AND the iron AND the part AND the component all at the same time.

Oh, and if Super Glue isn’t helping, try the newer Super Glue for Wood. SG itself isn’t made to fill gaps, so that may explain why you can’t get your chips to stick together. SG for Wood fills & would solve that problem. Make sure you let it harden before you try to solder over it.

Bridging gaps with solder vs. herding cats? I’d rather herd cats.

For bridging stars on a Nanjg-105, I use a wee piece of wire, scrounged from Cat6 Ethernet cable. This is MUCH easier to solder & if I ever actually need the SOS, it’ll be much easier to cut the wire than to get all the solder off. I tin the tip of the wire, lay it in place, then use the drop-on-tip trick to stick it. Then cut off the excess with Flush Cutters. That same trick may work with 7135s, especially if you glue them down first. You could use one or two of the strands of any stranded copper wire.

You can put on two or more sets of reading glasses to get even more magnification. Don’t ask me how I know that!

If you shake as badly as I do, you can arrange to work next to a small piece of wood. Use it as a rest/fulcrum for the hot shaft of the iron as you work.

Cleaning up excess solder, you can use a “Solder Sucker”, a wick, or take a drinking straw in your mouth & when the solder is hot enough to flow DO NOT SUCK, but blow hell out of it. Aim the blow in a safe direction, obviously. What few dingleberries stick will usually be easy to knock off. Obviously that’s not the best idea, but it works in a pinch.

The over-the-counter “sleep aid” pills can settle the shakes if you can’t, but I have learned to work with the shakes over the years.

Hope that helps some & I’ll pop back with anything else I can think of.

TTFN.

Funny thing about this thread is it's not your usual vanity posting .

lots of people come to blf looking for a bit of escape and are looking to lust after the newest greatest toy .

this thread says .."oh yeah I have 14 lights over here I can't fix" or maybe I'm one of the best modders on Blf but here's where I burnt a hole in the seat of my wife's new car with a soldering iron .

I like the BLF reality show .it's messy and looks a lot like real life

I have chips ...and haven't been tempted to try to solder them yet . thanks to this and many other posts I might wait a bit longer .

do a lot of simple 2 wire emitter swaps ..quick easy and give a lot of bang for your buck ..Nichia nichia nichia

I've had a few talks with light junkie over the phone, and I have to say that he is persistent. I can also tell that his experience has been extremely frustrating. Hopefully the responses here have given you some ideas, and I'm not going to try and rehash everything since I think that there has been plenty of good advice here.

I think that there is some basic soldering skill that is amiss here, but it is hard to tell what. Until that is figured out, I think you're going to continue to have a hard time. It sounds like you have the right equipment: good solder, and a good station.

When I first started, it was beneficial to watch some videos on YouTube about the fundamentals of soldering. Check out a few of these videos:


Being shaky and having poor vision definitely make things more difficult--I can't do good work without good light, especially with these tiny drivers. To help steady myself, I almost always rest my arm or elbow on a solid surface; when my arm is up in the air I have a much harder time stacking chips. That said, some of the best work I've seen on this forum was done by Old-Lumens, who isn't the smoothest or the youngest one here by a long shot.

Everyone has their own way of stacking chips, and there is definitely more than one correct way to do it, but this is what has worked best for me:

1. Bend 7135 legs. Use a square edged tool, like a set of needle nose pliers, to bend the legs down with a flat blade screwdriver. The chip package needs to be supported so it doesn't get broken when you bend the legs. If you look at the underside of the 7135, if you can see any of the black part of the case it isn't supported enough.

I solder all three legs and not the back tab, although for some the back tab is their preference. This may be easier if you have shaky hands because it lessens the chance of bridging between two close pins (if you clip off the middle pin). However, I prefer the front because sometimes the blob creates clearance issues if it gets too big.

2. Pre-tin existing 7135 legs. I've found that this helps speed things up a lot and reduces dealing with "stubborn" legs. I add some flux to the legs, then heat each one until it turns shiny and takes bit of solder.

3. Position 7135. I use the alligator clips on my helping hands to both hold the driver and secure the new chip in place. I don't use any glue, hemostats, or anything like that.

4. Solder 7135 legs.

First, I add a bit of flux to the 7135 legs.

Second, I clean my tip and add a small bit of solder onto the tip.

Third, I start by touching the tip to the pre-tinned bottom leg first, waiting until I see solder starting to take on that leg, then I drag it up onto the the upper 7135 leg, dabbing an extra bit of solder in there once things are melted if needed. The flux will make it flow right up the leg. It shouldn't take more than 1 or 2 seconds for all of this to happen if everything is right. Repeat for the other legs.

A note on heat: At no point when I'm doing this does the driver get too hot for me to touch it. If any joint is taking more than 1-3 seconds to make, something is wrong: not enough flux, not a clean tip, or incorrect tip temperature.

After doing thousands of these I can almost do them without looking now, but that is only because I have lots of positive muscle memory built up. As was mentioned, poor muscle memory can also occur through poor practice--so practice doesn't make perfect if you're practicing bad habits. It is harder to unlearn bad habits than it is to learn good habits in the first place, but it can be done.

I use a dot of arctic silver epoxy to stack the chips before soldering. Be sure not to short it to the side pins with the epoxy. Really makes the job easier and hopefully has a little better thermal path (yes, very little!)

I’ll give the 7 13th a break until next week, RMM you hit one important thing I have never thought of, pretinniting the legs prior to trying to solder and the very first video I watched he’d and tried to emulate was Old Lumens I’m sure I missed some small things and I need to find some old electronic trash parts to practice on.

For the first 1,000 chips or so I didn't pre-tin the existing 7135 legs, but even with flux I would always end up with a few stubborn legs that refused to take solder without holding the iron there for 5-10 seconds, heating up the chips and driver more than necessary. After I started pre-tinning the legs it has been smooth sailing! I will try to make a video for you.

I forgot to mention tip selection: I think that most here prefer a small chisel tip, and while I have tried several I prefer a fatter blunt round tip. I think it is largely a matter of personal preference, but if you try to use a tip with a skinny point you are going to have a harder time due to the smaller thermal transfer ability.