What's a decent quality but not too expensive soldering iron

[Hobie-wan]

Also handy is a desoldering bulb and some desoldering braid. You'll also want something to clean the tip of your soldering iron, whether that's just a wet sponge, one of those copper mesh deals, or the little tin of tip cleaner.

[skate323k137]

desoldering irons are where it's at, hollow tip iron w/ the bulb built in. cheap at radio shack, and better than the braid by far.

[Ziggy]

Yeah, I picked one up from Radio Shack not too long ago. Much better than an iron and bulb separate. Didn't want to recommend it to a beginner though, the bulb by itself is only a few bucks.

Also handy is a desoldering bulb

That's the first thing I mentioned

[Hobie-wan]

Also handy is a desoldering bulb

That's the first thing I mentioned

I am blind sir, can you spare a carrot?

[jfe2]

Thanks so much for the suggestions! I will definitely be picking up this stuff sometime this week. I was wondering though if there is any specific size tip that I should be looking for... I'm assuming the smaller the better.

I really got inspired recently after reading some of the topics here and decided to try and research the possibility of repairing or modding older game consoles. One of the things to really interest me was actually Ziggy587's SNES repro thread. It really fascinates me for whatever reason! My curiosity got to the point where I actually asked to fix one of my friends old NES consoles that had a bad pin connector just to start out. It was admittedly simple, but I had some weird sense of pride when the flashing red screen went away. After fixing his console I picked up two more NES...es... at a flea market just to mess around with them.

One more thing to note, I did put a mod chip in a Playstation around ten or eleven years ago. I remember using a soldering iron that's tip was WAY too big, but I still use the console to this day so I must have done something right!

I know this has already been a bit long winded, but I just wanted to say thanks to Ziggy587 and Hobie-wan, and the community in general real quick! I just signed up for this board recently and its nice to have interesting and productive discussions with intelligent people such as yourselves. This is an awesome community from what I've seen so far!

[Ziggy]

Glad to see I'm inspiring people lol. As far as tip size goes, it would be your discretion based purely on the task at hand. For the kind of things you're looking to do, I would just get the finest tip you can find. If you're going the Radio Shack route, the $15/15w iron should be a fine starter iron for you.

I am blind sir, can you spare a carrot?

I'll give you a free pass as I called it a "desolder device"

[Hobie-wan]

I know this has already been a bit long winded, but I just wanted to say thanks to Ziggy587 and Hobie-wan, and the community in general real quick! I just signed up for this board recently and its nice to have interesting and productive discussions with intelligent people such as yourselves. This is an awesome community from what I've seen so far!

No problem. Glad to help. Here's a really good video on soldering.

[bacteria]

I use cheap ones from e-bay. 30w, pencil point, cost about £5 each including postage; work great! Search on e-bay as "30w soldering iron"

[Ziggy]

I just watched that video, and it's great. There was things I was thinking to add, but he covered it all pretty good.

Makes me want to get a new iron lol. I've outgrown Radio Shack, but I'm not ready to drop the money on the upgrade.

[bacteria]

Indeed, one of the best soldering videos i've seen.