Technique for soldering parallel power bus

[ErikY]

Please once again forgive my newbie questions.

I searched on the web and could not find anything very helpful on this.

I am working on the $50 robot, and trying to connect the breakaway pins to my PCB in parallel for the power busses.

Is there a good technique for doing this? I tried heating between the pins and applying solder but ended up with very ugly blobs of solder and not nice connections like in the tutorial pics.

Any suggestions would be helpful, thanks!

[jkerns]

Solder the end of a wire across the two pins and clip the excess when you are done?

[ErikY]

Thanks, that would certainly work, and I may end up doing that, but I got the impression that Admin was doing something different in this pic:

http://www.societyofrobots.com/images/sbs_connect1_large.JPG

It looked to me like he was just applying solder directly between the two pins, which I tried and could not get to work.

Thanks.

[rbtying]

With a good soldering iron and a wide tip, it's possible to bridge the connections without a wire to wick the solder across. You need to make sure that both pins are heated equally, and that the solder flows between them to form the joint. With some practice, you should be able to get the hang of it, though it gets rather difficult when working with 3+ pins.

Seeing as you've got plenty of spare component leads, however, there's really no reason to spend that kind of effort.

[Soeren]

Hi,

With a good soldering iron and a wide tip, it's possible to bridge the connections without a wire to wick the solder across. []

It's not the flow of solder that's the main problem with this method.
During use, the board will flex (if ever so little at a time) and either the pad breaks away or, more likely, the solder breaks - while solder may seem soft, it's not good at resisting vibrations.

A wire (used solder wick is good for power traces) is flexible in quite another league.