Saturday, January 30, 2010

Soldering . . . it's not just for jewelry

So the other day my son told me his sister's Star Wars light saber wasn't working. I reacted in a "whatever" kind of manner, meaning: 1) I was busy and couldn't deal with it right then, and 2) but it's probably cheap plastic and can't be fixed anyway. Well, my son opened it up and passed it on to my husband. He took one look at it and said, "Honey, can you get your soldering tools out and try to fix this?"

Huh? You mean soldering isn't just for jewelry? You can actually solder, ahem, wires in other objects together? Leave it to a non-jewelry maker to think of this. He stripped the plastic off the end of the wire for me, and I got out the soldering iron. I snipped a tiny piece of solder. The tricky part was balancing the little piece on top of the two wires. I think the gel flux helped it stick. One tiny hit with the iron, and the solder flowed over the wires, joining them together. Voila! A saber that lights again. All is well in the universe.