I’m using a 4.2 mm flat / screwdriver tip. Largest conical tip I have is 0.2mm and I don’t remember seeing any larger conical tips available for my iron.
It looks to be getting up to around 360 c but that is being measured with a temp gun and might be off since the metal tip is slightly reflective.
I know how to solder with an iron but I just usually solder very small parts for the most part. 1 mm wide small for some stuff. My issue is that I was going to run 10 awg wire through my deck for the battery connection which will act like a giant heat sink.
I don’t know the best way to use the solder gun though since they’re horrible for precision so I never bothered with them before
The other day my VESC (ubox v1) turned off while I was throttling up a hill. I’m pretty banged up but mostly ok. First inclination was a bad connection on the battery, but everything looks good here, right?
Does the VESC work now? Was it a fault or a full power off and you were able to power it back on?
The series connections look good, but maybe check the welds and the voltage at the end of the pack while moving the battery around to see if it fluctuates
Yeah, the VESC seems to work just fine and powered right up afterwards…I believe discharge is run through the BMS but tbh I don’t really know what I’m doing. Which connection would that be? My previous build bypassed discharge and I never had an issue like this. Pic below
I caved in and bought a ts100 iron after realizing that it took 20+ minutes just to remove the remnants of solder and 10 awg wire from my VESC. Now if only I did that last night after it took too many hours to remove the other 5.
I’m blaming you all for making me spend $90 on one tiny soldering iron and a replacement tip though.
This might be the cause. Running fast up a hill uses a lot of battery amps, and may have triggered the BMS’s overcurrent protection cutting off power to the VESC.
There are a few threads on how to wire it up as bypassed
No, you have to disconnect your ESC from the C- port (On the right side on this photo) and connect it to the B- port (the one you have the arrow pointed to).
You want a straight path from the battery negative to the ESC with no BMS in between.
The only thing that should go to your C- port is your charge port, and any accessories (lights, USB ports, horn, heated seats).
Not always. His BMS looks like a combined-type BMS, with only B- and C- (C- and P- effectively combined). He needs to move his ESC from C- to B-.
It looks like I have 2 separate negative connections going into the B- ports from the battery negative… does it matter which one I disconnect? One is enough right?
Probably the easiest way to get a good clean setup (You have a lot of heavy gauge wire-spaghetti going on there) is to:
Disconnect both negative wires from the battery and the BMS B-.
Solder the ESC negative directly to the battery.
Solder a small gauge wire from the battery negative to B- on the ESC for charging/accessories.
You can also replace any other heavy-gauge wires with thinner ones (22 to 18AWG should be plenty as long as you’re not using a charger above 10A or so), like the charge port positive, the charge port negative, basically anything that isn’t directly between the battery and the ESC.
Another thing I would recommend is reinforcing the battery terminals with some wire or copper strip (bus bars) to even out the current draw a bit, like you’ve done with your series connections using multiple wires. Those single connection points combined with the ladder-style nickel strip tend to create hot spots.
As someone who has minimal soldering experience and 0 extra wire, it’s fine to use the existing heavier guage wire and just resolder to the correct spots, yeah?
Weller WESD51 is the best thing you can have for general esk8 purposes.
Only exception is people churning out a lot of high capacity batteries - they could probably have a 1/2” or 3/4” chisel tip weller direct plugin as well.
Once you have the WESD51, a ts100 or whatever else of the low profile & compact offerings (pinecil? (makers of pinephone) is nice to have around for travel or working with smaller wires in tight spaces, but just for convenience reasons. Nothing they can do that they WESD51 can’t, it’s just a bit bulky to move around.
A butane torch is also good to have for bullet connectors…
You can take the black wire that goes from the BMS to the XT90 and solder that to the negative battery side, leave everything else as is. One cut/solder job and you bypassed it.
Can you tell us the battery current setting? Anything > 30 (per side) would overpower that BMS eventually…
I did see that one on Amazon and was tempted to get it since my current iron is a Weller and has worked very well aside from not getting hot enough. Since most of my soldering work is on smaller stuff that doesn’t need high heat I figured I might as well get the ts100 so that way I can work on my board even if I can’t get it on my desk.
Although also partially because I was worried that I’d have the same issue with it not getting hot enough and everyone on the soldering thread had no issues getting the ts100 to solder larger wires. Some information on the ts100 mentioned how it didn’t just set the temperature of the iron to what you set it to but that it would increase the temperature if needed during soldering due to components acting like heat sinks.
Now that I’m not as tired, I’m starting to think that the weller probably does the same thing but just didn’t list that in the details. Yesterday it seemed like that was only a feature on industrial/commercial use stations which did make the ts100 seem more worth it. At the very least the ts100 was $30 less than the weller + buying more tips since they never include the large tips with irons.
Edit: I don’t think I need to blame this forum for me buying a $90 iron anymore. Just went to tes fit my enclosure to figure out where to cut a hole for the phase wires and pulled on the phase wires with enough force to try and bend them into shape. Only for them to come off the board easily. turns out despite my best efforts my iron did not get hot enough to fully solder the wires to the VESC which means the new iron is very necessary.
Yesterday it seemed like that was only a feature on industrial/commercial use stations which did make the ts100 seem more worth it. At the very least the ts100 was $30 less than the weller + buying more tips since they never include the large tips with irons.
turns out despite my best efforts my iron did not get hot enough to fully solder the wires to the VESC which means the new iron is very necessary.