Portable soldering iron recommendations?

I've got a couple butane soldering irons. They work ok, but recently I had to do a repair on an alarm panel (fusible link was blown) and didn't have one in the truck. Rather than a 45 minute trip (one way) back to the shop I stopped by a local Radio Shack and found one that operates on a couple AA batteries. Along with it I picked up a small roll of light (thin) rosin core solder. I also bought a pack of batteries to go in it, as I didn't expect them to last long. That soldering iron has seen half a dozen uses in the field now, and at the moment it sitting on my work bench because I just used to to make up some battery packs. It still has the first set of batteries in it. The pack I bought has come in handy, but so far not for that iron.

I would not use it to try and solder a T-tap in 12 ga electrical wire, but it does a great job for fine soldering of 22ga stuff, circuit boards, etc and its great in close quarters were I am not 100% certain of the flammability of the surrounding dust and the glow of a butane iron makes me nervous.

I don't know what its life actually is because I don't normally use it on the bench, but I've had it for over a year. Normally it rides around in my tool pouch in the truck.

P.S. I think if I needed more heat and used it for longer at a time I would look for one of the old oversized Weller butane irons.

P.P.S. I guess over a year isn't recently...LOL

I have one of those so-called "cold" soldering irons too - 2 AA batteries -and it is cold all right - have never been able to solder anything with the useless piece of junk.

I don't know what a "cold" soldering iron is, and if the one I got said "cold" anywhere on it I would not have bought it.

Mine is made (or imported) by "coldheat" in Van Nuys California. It uses 4 AA batteries and it has 2 "carbon" electrodes, separated by a thin insulator. It only heats when the 2 carbons are shorted by the workpiece.

I bought one to solder the 12ga wires in my attic when I put up the emergency lighting. It didn't even tin one wire by itself. Grrr.

They're good for anything up to 89 gauge wire and a 1-surface pad. Forget thru pads or anything real.

Luckily, I got a buck more for mine when I sold it than I had paid on eBaaaah.

Mine was a christmans gift from my daughter -

I was NOT talking about a "cold" soldering iron. The battery one I got is a regular iron, and it heats the tip when you hold the button slide forward. I still wouldn't use it for a 12 ga solder joint, but it works fine for small stuff. I suspect its around 15-20 watts based on how it performs. I used to have a low power 25 watt corded one back in the days before thin-net was affordable and ethernet was even known about to most people for making up 25 pin LapLink cables. We transferred a lot of data over a parallel port at about 400K with them. Heck, I sold a lot of parallel transfer cables for that matter. It wasn't elegant, but it worked.

So sell it on eBay and buy one which works. She'll never know the difference. If she does, just tell her you buffed it out. Yeah, that's the ticket.