Gentoo, Luxi, the Weller BP645 Soldering Iron

Finally, after all these years, I've installed Gentoo. It's really nice, and reminds me of BSD Ports, except that the documentation is more thorough. Ports is good, but Gentoo's emerge is really, really nice. It's also fast, as expected, and took a long time to build, as expected.

I installed KDE too. Again, another first, as I've never installed it with a real intention of using it. Until Ubuntu with GNOME, I was mostly an WindowMaker/AfterStep user. KDE's nice. It's faster than GNOME. Unfortunately, it's not as attractive as GNOME. KDE feels like "lego land". GNOME feels more like "Mac land" before OS X. KDE's control panel is better than GNOME, and redeems KDE's relative ugliness. KDE also makes it easy to use OS X style app menus - a feature that's easy to overlook, but improves the interface considerably.

One thing that's nice with KDE is the Luxi font. That's a Bigelow and Holmes riff on the Lucida font (which is used by OS X). Luxi is very nice for menus. Thanks B*H.

Now, the bad news.

The Weller portable soldering iron was on deep discount, so I got it. Too bad the soldering iron, basically, doesn't solder much. The tip gets real hot, as advertised, but the mass that's heated is so small that touching it to a wire quickly brings the temperature down to below the melting point of the solder.

To make things worse, the kit comes with lead-free solder. This is healthier, but, I ended up replacing it with leaded solder. This gives the iron a wider range of temps to work with.

This iron can only make pretty lousy cold solder joints. These connections won't hold up over time. The iron can't heat the objects being soldered, so the solder will tend to blob. Ultimately, this requires resoldering with a regular, corded iron.

The best use for this tool is "on the road" when you need to fix a connection, but can't set up a little soldering work area. You can make your quick fix, and make plans to fix it properly later.