How do people shield and solder so easily?

[T-Bird]

Originally Posted by Matthew_84

Oh, I'm using a 30W iron. Maybe that's the problem. I kept it there for several minutes at least.

IMHO/IME using a 30 watter is one of Your problems.

Originally Posted by Matthew_84

I did use the Stewmac tape, but am not confident in the adhesive's conductiveness overtime, but I used the method mentioned prior to ensure good continuity.

Well, not trying to rain on Your parade, but the conductivity between the pieces with the method you did use is going to fail pretty quickly as the oxide builds up on the surfaces. Faster than the conductive adhesive would've deteriorated, that's for sure.

Which leads to another point we didn't know at the start.
You tried to solder copper tape that's not designed to be soldered.
I'm not familiar with the StewMac's offerings, but I'd suspect that the copper tape with conductive adhesive would be indeed treated with a protective layer of some kind. That layer would have to be either dissolved or mechanically removed before any attempts on soldering are made.

Regards
Sam

[Bassamatic]

Actually, the Stew-Mac tape solders well. I solder ground wires to it all the time. If it had a coating, it would not be conductive to the adhesive. The adhesive seems to "cure" after it is installed, so it should maintain adhesion and conductivity over time. Just get a slightly larger iron for that, or an adjustable one.

[C.Linton]

Acouple of tips: A lot of the problems with soldering is the tip being "dirty". After even just one or two uses, the tip starts to carbonize and corrode, and that interferes with heat transference. You need to take a bit of sandpaper and/or use tip cleaner paste to the tip occasionally. Another thing is after each job, you should loosen the tip a bit, the tip after heating and then cooling down a few times it will eventually loosen up (by expanding and contracting), allowing the threads to oxidize, and compromisng the ellectrical/heat flow. You may need to clean out the threads on the tip or iron with a wire brush.

[VinKreepo]

Btw, you do know you don't have to solder a ground to your copper tape right? Just ground ALL of your pots; that is definitely sufficient to ground the copper shielding. That's how I've done it on my bass and it's super quiet.

[jmclearnon]

btw if you have any active components or heat sensitive components, you must use heat sink on the edges of where you are soldering...

You can blow the MOSFET chips for example in preamps.

[Kmonk]

There are different types of solder which are meant to be used for different purposes. There are also different tips. Do some research before you try to do anything.

[walterw]

+1 to scraping the surfaces of the parts a little to get fresh metal to solder to. stewmac copper foil solders easily as is.

a fatter soldering iron tip helps a lot, so that you can touch a bigger section of the part at once, getting more heat into it.

oh, and it should never take more than maybe a second or two to get the part hot enough to melt the solder into it!