It’s been a while since we’ve had a fresh How-To on the Hack-A-Day, and frankly we’ve missed them. To get things rolling, [Eliot] and I wanted to build a good knowledge base to help you hack your own ...

Here’s a nice video from Steve Dahl of Digikey showing how you can use a heat gun to solder high-brightness LEDs to an aluminum substrate heat sink. In the demo he uses a Steinel programmable heat gun ...

If you’ve ever tried to solder to aluminum, you know it isn’t easy without some kind of special technique. [SimpleTronic] recently showed a method that chemically plates copper onto aluminum and ...

Apart from school, and two weeks at college on a course, I have no idea how to use a lathe. Apart from school, and two weeks at college on a course, I have no idea how to use a lathe. But over ...

Soldering uses alloys that melt below 840°F to join metals. Molten solder fills the space between surfaces to be joined, adheres to the surfaces, and solidifies. Typical soldering steps include: ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

Surface-mount V-chip aluminium electrolytic capacitors from ACAL Components are designed to withstand reflow soldering to +260°C. Manufactured by NIC Components, the six new families of liquid ...

I snapped one of the crossbars in the aluminum frame of my futon (don't ask how), and was wondering if its possible to repair such a thing with solder? I have an iron and a ton of solder that I never ...