What was the vedict on soldering vs pinning?

[Sanguinemetaldawn]

There was a thread a while back on soldering vs pinning minis together. What was the concensus?

Obviously pinning + superglue is the only option for plastic minis, but what about metal?

Also, has anyone tried soldering plus pinning? Basically drilling etc as for a regular pinning, but using solder instead of epoxy.

Thanks.

 

[Lorthanoth]

I've never heard of anyone using solder for ordinary pinning - I've used superglue and epoxy resin, which both work fine. Solder seems like too much fuss.

 

[Nifft]

Solder is fine for electrical connections, but it's not all that strong, is it?

I could see it being fun for making a nice liquid metal golem mini, though...

Cheers, -- N

 

[JustKim]

Obviously pinning + superglue is the only option for plastic minis,

Derailing for a minute, there is no need to pin a plastic mini. Glue bonds to plastic very well, and in fact, putting a metal pin through the bond might actually weaken it.

 

[Lorthanoth]

Agree there. Poly cement melts the plastic together very well.

 

[Pbartender]

I tried soldering a mini once...

The trouble is that any soldering iron hot enough to melt the solder is hot enough to melt whatever your miniature is made of. You simply can't find solder iron tips of the right power, size and shape to make it work, and it ends up being far more trouble than it's worth.

So, unless your intention to make a home-made Gibbering Mouther or Chaos Beast, I'd recommend against it.

Solder is fine for electrical connections, but it's not all that strong, is it?

A solder connection can be plenty strong... The trick is that you have to heat up the parts you soldering together hot enough to melt the solder, otherwise the solder won't stick to them very well and you end up a weak "cold solder" joint that can be pulled apart by hand. Like I said above, that's what makes soldering minis so difficult. In oerder to get a good solder joint, you'd have to get the mini itself hot enough to melt.

 

[Deset Gled]

I don't deal with mini's, but I do deal with electronics assembly a lot. Soldering should certainly be possible, but probably isn't worth the effort. You can get low powered soldering irons (15W or so), and grind the points down to whatever size you need. I've modded a PS2 with a DMS3 chip with this type of equipment, which involvles soldering to targets less than 1mm in diameter, and sometimes soldering directly to a chip. I'm pretty confident this is more detailed than you'll need to be for most work on minis. However, this can be a pretty serious undertaking, and involves a lot of practice. I would think that a simple metal-to-metal adhesive like Loctite would be a much simpler solution that would work just as well.