I decided I need to put longer wires on the 3DR power module. So I figure no big deal, I'll just unsolder the wires it has on it, and solder my new ones on to whatever length I want. Easy, this will take about 10 minutes total including heat shrink.
I give up. What prey-tel are these wires soldered onto here with??? My cheap 15 watt soldering iron wasn't putting a dent in it, so i grabbed the butane. Still not even close to melting. Butane cranked to full after-burner, nothing.
I'm probably going to have to solder and heat shrink wire to wire, which I really don't want to do. But these things are not budging.
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Let me clarify. It's a butane soldering iron. It's actually a multi-functional butane tool with interchangeable heads. Soldering iron, heat gun, cutter, torch, etc. I was using the soldering head, not the torch head. Trust me, that thing gets way hotter than a typical electric soldering iron when I crank it up to full throttle.
Well, it's not just about how hot it gets, but rather the amount of heat it can transfer into whatever you need to solder. I've changed out and soldered leads for a number of Power Modules with a simple 65 Watt desktop solder station at about 3/4s of its power. Maybe you need an old skool Weller solder gun!
Humph. Well if you've unsoldered those before, then I must question my tool. lol
I find that joints like that, with that much copper and heat sink to it, are almost impossible to melt with your standard soldering iron, even a butane based one, so I go for something like my old standby for high heat applications. I actually have a slightly older 120W version, but it works just the same. It makes a huge difference, especially for battery leads, where you need a lot of heat in a lot of area! Takes a 2 hour job and gets it done in 10 minutes. You can pick up even cheaper, but equally reliable ones at most hardware stores. Not very precise, but when it comes to larger gauge wires and high dissipation applications, they're incredibly helpful. Just my two cents!
You probably need at least about 40 to 50 watts to heat up that much solder area. All that copper on the board and the thick wires acts as a pretty good heat sink. I'm not sure a butane torch works well as a soldering device, at least I never tried. You just need a good amount of heat to do the job.