Reply To: soldering irons

[Mike HurleyParticipant @mikehurley60381]

An amusing soldering iron story! (yes there is one)

As a youth, after never settling into a job that interested me, I ended up working as a junior technition for an American company that supplied & maintained electro-mechanical & electronic invoicing machines ( pre office computer days). One model was quite a clever bit of electronic kit with a box of discrete components / TTL ics etc in the back. One feature was a group of indicators on the front panel, these were in place of small neons / lamps and were quite delicate. they had the habit of sticking occasionaly. Not repairable, change out – one screw 2 soldered tab connections the famous '5 minute job'.

As a first 'ouside' job, I was sent to do one locally, With my brand new tool kit in hand I confidently appeared and began to settle in front of the machine and remove the small access cover. Got my screwdriver and soldering iron to hand. At this point I should mention that many of the older mechanical electro-mechanical machines the company looked after were 110V supplied by a large auto transformer on the floor. These had 4 american-style sockets on the top. Nobody had told me about this 'feature'!

This piece of more modern kit was standard 220 UK however.

Looked at my soldering iron and noticed it had a 'funny' plug on it – no problem, I duly rewired it with a standard 13 amp plug I had in my kit on something else. Plugged it in and started to desolder the indicator, did notice the body of the iron was getting very, very hot. ( to be fair to me the boss had given me the standard toolkit used for electromechanical kit -i.e. the 110v sort, so sodering irons were designed to fit into the transformer mentioned above – but I didn't know and had never come across anything different to UK 'mains' before)

You are probably ahead of me at this point. PHUT!

The machine was in the workshop for about a week while the proper techs had to change virtually every electronic component – I was not popular to say the least! The customer wasn't very pleased either. I had to return there occasionaly over the years by which time I was fully experienced and competant – but there always seemed to be a bit of an 'atmosphere' though whenever I turned up.

Oh the confidence / ignorance of youth!