A lot of people have a soldering iron chosen for working with PCB components and AWG 26 wire, where 30 watts is plenty of power output and a nice small tip is to be prized.

But if you take that perfectly good soldering iron and apply it to AWG 10 wire, you're going to have a bad time - because the wire will conduct heat away almost as fast as you can apply it.

Yeah, maybe. I have been spoiled by the TS100/Pinecil, it's the first soldering iron I've owned (besides a $5 trash iron) so I don't know how bad other (otherwise good) irons are.

I never knew about the Pinecil before this post. Thanks for that.

Personally own the TS100 and absolutely adore it for mostly building keyboards.

Yes you are absolutely spoiled by both of these. Before them were super terrible irons or the expensive brick sized ones with minimal optionality. Having come from the 'dark ages' it's night and day.

I just got a pinecil and it’s great! I have a long workbench and I mostly use the pinecil with a usbc battery because I can put that in my lap and have the power cable totally free from my work.

The debug board, which I don’t have is a great example of using usbc for development and debug (as opposed to test contacts inside the device).

It does need a version 2 though as the tip holders are not great.

Its not that people consciously choose bad soldering irons, its more of an awareness problem and flood of chinese hakko 936 clones. Nobody knows why 60 year old technology (heater behind separate tip) is bad until they meet their first ground plane on modern multilayer board.

re: cost, I'll hazard a guess that it was the 'Neugart PLE 60 Planetary Gearbox' that blew the budget. A quick check on ebay says usd$750.

ps. thanks for the tinning walkthru below

I got the gearbox used on eBay for about 100€. There are plenty of them available.

Ah, very good!

It's great to see good builds like this - I keep saying "one of these days". In my neck of the woods we have a pretty resource in the form of GRIN[0]. I believe Justin is a longtime participant on endless-sphere.

My latest build (on a Walmart special) was a BBS02 that probably rings in around the same cost but without the openness of this build.

[0] https://ebikes.ca/

It is very hard to tin the cable ends well and tinning is key to soldering. I have a proper soldering iron, but no special device to only tin cables (I’m blanking on the right word).

Hmm, you don't need a device though? Hold the wire somewhere, touch the iron onto the wire and then touch the tin onto the wire as well. Wait a bit, it'll tin thoroughly, (maybe change the position of the tin to tin all sides more easily).

Yes, this is how it works on thin cables, but the ones on the ECU are very thick and very hard to tin with soldering iron. I finally managed it, but it was a fight. I’m using the TS100 pen.

Oh hmm, I see. Did you try pressing the button for a boost? I just tinned 12 AWG wire very easily, were yours much thicker? Also keep in mind that if you don't run the TS100 at 24V it'll have more difficulty keeping the temperature.

I'm an embedded hardware engineer, so I don't have much experience with wire for high-current applications, but I was surprised to see soldering as the method for the connector. Can anyone working with high-power devices chime in on if this is more common than crimping at this gauge? Maybe solder is more accessible to the hobbyist at this wire thickness?

I build RC planes/quads, where 80A currents are not uncommon, and I use XT60 with 12AWG wire. I don't know if there's a crimped XT60 connector, but all the ones I've ever seen are soldered. I don't know why you'd crimp, it seems to me that soldering would be more efficient for high currents due to the larger surface area that makes contact, but I don't have specific data one way or another.

By chance I just soldered some 10 awg wire to an xt90 connector earlier today, using a Pinecil no less. It was super annoying to get right. Few cold joints before I got it. The problem was with the stiffness of the wire I used. It made it difficult to keep in the exact right position until the solder cooled down. Would have been easier with thinner or higher quality wire though.

Hmm, were you pressing the button to get the 400C boost? With that, first you tin the wire VERY WELL, then you put some solder in the nook of the connector (fill it about half), and then you push the wire into the nook with the iron. That will melt the solder on the wire and then the connector, and it should give you a nice even connection without any over- or underflow.

Once the wire goes in, you remove the iron, hold the wire there for a second or two until the solder solidifies, and you're done. I used 12 AWG but it should be pretty close.

EDIT: I just did it again, make sure you hold both the wire and the XT90 firmly with helping hands or something similar.

Soldering heavy gauge wire is more about having thermal mass in the iron tip than high temperature. That is part of why you can buy different tips - selecting the tip with the right thermal mass will allow you to quickly get the workpiece up to temp without overheating anything nearby.

You can hack it by just turning the temperature way up, but there are a number of drawbacks to doing so. It's better to use the right tip.

The bike itself doesn't look cheap.

I don't think the bike was included in the price, was it? He says "kit".

From the paragraph above the photos it seems to indicate that the bike itself was part of the cost, but it's not totally clear to me.

> Being on a tight budget, I was able to procure/purchase all parts month by month and finish the build within a year. This includes all parts for the kit, as well as building the bike itself, which I did not have prior to starting the project. You can see the final build below.

Ah OK, it makes sense if it includes the bike.

The cost that I mention in my post doesn't include the cost of the bike. I payed 1212€ just for the kit.