Today we learned about soldering. Daddy bought a soldering kit.
Soldering Kit
Soldering is where you heat up a special metal until it melts and then you use it to stick other bits of metal together. The special metal is called “solder”. It is mainly tin.
Solder
We started by watching a video on soldering.
Then we switched on the soldering iron, waited for it to get hot and melted some solder.
Hot, hot, hot.
We tapped the drops of solder onto some paper to have a look at them. They were shiny and all sorts of different shapes.
Solder drops.
Next we tried soldering some wire together. It worked really well.
Joining wire.
Daddy bought some bits of electronics so we could make something. There was an LED (a small light), a cable to connect a battery and a switch.
Electronics.
Frieda drew some of the things we were using.
Frieda's drawing.
We decided that we wanted to make a lamp for our dolls’ house. First we soldered the LED onto the battery cable. We put a straw over it to make part of the lamp. When we put batteries in the battery box the LED lit up!
Lit up LED.
We put some plasticine on one end of the straw and a paper cone on the other end. Then we added the switch. Here is the finished lamp in our dolls’ house:
The finished lamp.
Mummy wanted to know how to solder too so we showed her how it was done.
Showing mummy how to solder.
We liked soldering. We started to look around for things we could take apart and reuse. We found part of a solar lamp that we’re going to do something with next time.
Broken lamp.
We’re going to put all the bits we find into a special box.
Box for bits.