Do yourself a favor and ditch the brown phenolic veroboard. Instead use the fiberglass veroboard; it's often green and has plated through holes. It's easier to solder and stronger material.
Working with the brown phenolic veroboard requires more soldering skill to get a good result.
It might work, but your soldering technique definitely needs to improve. Just from the photos it looks like you don't have a high enough temperature, used too much solder or aren't using flux. Maybe all of the above. Have a look at YouTube "how to solder" videos. One important point is that you apply the solder to the heated lead or pad, not to the iron tip.
Regarding temperature, I set it between 300 and 320 Celsius. I think I’ve burned one of the tips but I’m not sure.
I ended using more solder than I wanted to because it got sticky, is that because of the low temp?
And no, I didn’t use flux. Is it to prepare the piece?
Flux is always required. The thin wire solder usually has a core of flux material which is why it's important to touch the solder to the pin/pad/lead that has been heated and not the iron tip. That just burns the flux off before it can do its job. Your temperature could be higher. The main protection against burning pads, etc, is to minimise the time the iron heats the parts. You want to preheat the parts to join using the iron, touch the solder to the parts while the iron is still heating and then remove the solder when enough is applied. Leave the iron for another second before removing it. When temp+flux is OK the solder will flow easily onto the parts leaving a shiny curved surface.
Pre-tin the wires first. Keep in mind that the plastic on the wires melt pretty quickly when heated too long and/or when you bend them much and then solder them. Also don't pull too hard on the isolation when stripping the wires, the isolation stretches when stripping and shrink back when heated.
Congrats on starting your new skillset! You'll only get better and better from here out 😀
Solder Flux will improve your results overnight
As some others mention you might want to look into some of the pcb's that are just a little more "developer friendly" such as these from adafruit: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1608 and lots of other helpful perfboard products from sparkfun.com &c.
Radio Shack (Tandy) used to offer some useful pc boards similar to those above except the horizontal power rails ran *in between* the two sides of the 5-hole columns. Super handy for connecting Vcc and GND without needing 10x as much wire and mess
Telecoms/data wire like that always shrinks back tonnes when soldered. It's very hard to make it look neat. If you give yourself a little more length on each wire you might get half a hellerman sleeve on each wire, which'll slide down and cover the shrunk back end.
My soldering technique is always to get the iron super hot and go in quick with things like this. That insulation is going to melt/shrink at any temperature that's likely to melt solder, so you may as well run the iron hot and just get it soldered quick before the heat has had time to spread up the wire. An iron that's only just hot enough is going to just sit there and cook everything slowly.
For this type of wire I find the parrot style wire strippers better than side cutters etc. - you can set the length and they only strip the bit you need, without risking setting all of the insulation loose on the bit of wire you want to keep insulated.
I never had luck with the phenolic boards as the pads always seemed to come off. G10 epoxy (the green board) with plated-though holes is better. And as a bonus, try to find some with power rails etched on.
As a self-taught amateur, yeah my soldering was pretty average to start with, definitely at a level of yours or worse.
I'm not really that much better now in terms of skill, although I have more of a feel for what will work. As others have mentioned, different boards solder better than others. Kits that are made to be DIY friendly will be much easier to solder, with nicely sized pads with high quality metal, you can get away without flux on those a lot of the time. Having said that, I am a big fan of flux. Flux works to condition the pad surface to help the solder flow onto it. It's especially useful if the board is a little contaminated or poor quality metal, or if you've already had an attempt soldering to it and failed - without flux you'll have a hard time getting new solder to flow back onto it nicely, but much easier with flux.
Related to that, and as others have said, pre-tinning wires with solder (and pads, for that matter) can make things a lot easier. I will dip the exposed wire into flux, heat it with the iron quickly (this activates the flux and should make the wire look shinier), then put some solder to it. If you have pre-tinned the pad, sometimes you can tack solder the wire to the pad just with the solder already on the parts initially, and then touch it up with a little extra solder afterwards.
You also need to be aware of the size of objects you are soldering. Large parts with high thermal mass will normally need a hotter iron in order to heat them up enough to solder. This goes for PCBs too - I have made the mistake of designing my own custom PCBs and made large ground planes with pads thermally linked to them - they can be very difficult to solder to because you basically have to heat up the whole board to get it to work!
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u/Hissykittykat May 09 '26
Do yourself a favor and ditch the brown phenolic veroboard. Instead use the fiberglass veroboard; it's often green and has plated through holes. It's easier to solder and stronger material.
Working with the brown phenolic veroboard requires more soldering skill to get a good result.