However, not everyone has a good understanding of exactly what soldering involves compared to other forms of metal work such as casting or fabrication. Therefore, I thought it might be helpful to break it down and provide a basic explanation of soldering. If it still sounds intriguing, I suggest taking the next step and trying it out.
Let’s first start with the term “solder.” This is actually a metal alloy (a mixture of metals) which is heated in order to join one piece of metal to another piece of metal. Solder comes in different types of alloys such as silver solder and gold solder, and normally, you’d match the solder to the metal. For example, if you were soldering with silver, you’d use silver solder so that you wouldn’t see the solder after you finished soldering. It would just blend right into the other metal and sort of become invisible.
Therefore, the practice of “soldering” is using solder to join two pieces of metal. You heat the solder with a torch to the correct temperature (which varies depending on the type of metal), and the solder melts and flows between the two pieces of metal, thus bonding them together.
Due to the alloys in the solder, the melting point of the solder will have a lower melting point than the metal you are soldering. This allows the solder to melt sooner than the metal, which is obviously critical to the soldering process.
While learning to soldering is not really all that more difficult than wrapping a bead with wire, understanding what the metal is doing can be just as important to understanding the step by step process of learning how to solder.
