beginner's questions about soldering

I think you're going to have to dig into some really old stuff to find specific answers to this. I've been trying to remember the details, and some of it has come back, but not all of it.

I did this a few times when our shop was making scientific apparatus for a local university lab. Instructions came with the job. Roughly, it was this: Etch the glass lightly with (I think) nitric acid. The acid etch isn't absolutely necessary but it's generally used on jobs that require a good hermetic seal, which is what this was.

Then you "tin," or actually metallize, the glass with metal powder and a borate flux, using a torch flame and heating the glass hot enough to get the metal to flow. IIRC, the powder we used was either silver or tin.

Once the glass is metallized you can solder it any way you want. The specs on our job called for ordinary tin/lead solder (this was around 1974). Of course you have to be careful about heating the glass evenly, but the job itself was pretty easy. I did a number of them with no previous experience, and they all passed a pressure test.

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress
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Indium will wet glass and is used to bond glass faceplates to glass tubes. Don't know any more details than that.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

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Hmm ... Tektronix oscilloscopes used to use terminal strips made of notched bars of ceramic, with silver plating in the notches to form the terminals. There was a warning printed inside the 'scope, and a roll of special silver-bearing soft solder, because the standard lead-tin eutectic alloy would dissolve the silver over repeated re-solderings. This may suggest that the powder that you used was tin, or it may simply be that there was not enough resoldering to need to worry about the silver dissolving.

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

Well, it was a one-time solder joint, on a piece of vacuum apparatus.

I just got a Christmas card from my old partner. Maybe he remembers. I'll ask.

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Indium is a Dopant used or once used in Semiconductors. Used to make infused diodes. Place a ball in a carbon hole on top of a layer of Si (glass is SiO2) and it makes a internal joint. Atoms merge together.

I thought it was used on glass, then it was electro-plated with copper, then nickel or what was needed. Maybe lead.

Martin

Reply to
Eastburn

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