Solder Pot Advice

Solder pots are messy, fumey things -- they take a while to get up to full temperature, and take a big chunk of solder to get them going. Unless you have to tin a hundred wires or something, I wouldn't bother For small-quantity work, a broad tip on a good temperature-controlled iron is at least as good, and it's easier to keep from melting dielectrics (and burning your fingers!)

If you do go the solder pot route, make sure that your work area is very adequately ventillated.

Solder pots work well to tin the ends of Cardas and other enameled wires, but as implied above, for small projects, other methods may be just as good, such as a wire brush or sanding wheel on the end of a dremel.

I've actually had excellent results with litz wire (including Cardas) simply by cranking my soldering station to a little over 800F, and giving them a good tinning. I then turn it back down to the usual 700F for actual soldering.

But if you need more heat capacity for i.e. bigger litz speaker wires, you can use a big stained-glass style soldering iron for the tinning - they're cheap and should idle at about 800-850F. These things also work well for soldering to the chassis (i.e. Fender guitar amp ground connections) - it's actually the tool that was used in production for this purpose.

Other option is to look for melting pots for folks who do metal artwork. They are relatively inexpensive, and are easy to use. as mentioned, by other posters, make sure you do the tinning outside. Also if you are tinning wires with hi temp coatings, or tough coatings, buy some koester tinning flux (especially made for solder pot tinning) which helps clean the wire down to bare copper.

The other question you need to ask is which solder to put in the solder pot. You are going to need a lot of it; several pounds. I'd suggest koester 63/37 bar stock; available from on line eletronic parts houses; mouser, digikey etc.

The main advantage of using a solder pot vs. a high wattage iron, is the total available heat capacity and the lack of oxygen present when tinning. With a solder pot, the tinning is performed submersed on liquid solder, so not much oxygen is present.