If you need holes drilled in your plate or want terminals brazed on, I have the equipment to do this. Just contact me. My contact info is in the BVARC roster. Robert KD5YVQ
-----Original Message----- From: BVARC <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Rick Hiller via BVARC Sent: Saturday, October 01, 2022 7:15 PM To: BRAZOS VALLEY AMATEUR RADIO CLUB <[email protected]> Cc: Rick Hiller <[email protected]>; Jonathan Guthrie, KA8KPN <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [BVARC] Solder help I did similar to Jonathan with an AL plate. Drilled and bolts put thru. Using OxGard or No-Ox on all bolt/washer/ wire connections. You can use Solder lugs soldered to wire ends for easy of assembly. But not necessary. D X Engineering sells a Radial Plate but they are easy to build and cheaper. The soldering comments are all excellent. I used a special low temp solder paste for AL years ago. Called Solder-It, if I remember correctly. GL ES 73. Rick. W5RH Sent from my i-Thingamajig > On Oct 1, 2022, at 5:39 PM, Jonathan Guthrie, KA8KPN via BVARC > <[email protected]> wrote: > > First, I'm attaching photos of the thing I made for doing something similar. > It's made from a chunk of plywood I found in the garage, some 14 gauge > Romex(tm), and some stainless steel hardware I bought. There are six > carriage bolts with wingnuts to attach ground radials to and the PVC cap in > the center is held on with some threaded rod intended to stick into the > ground. I don't know if this will help you solve the meta problem of making > something to attach ground radials to, but I include it because I think it's > a good solution for homemade antennas. > > I've read the other responses that have been written to your question so far, > and while there is good advice there, I think it might be useful to explain > some of the why's behind the advice. I'm sure I'll get lots of corrections > for the things I get wrong, but here goes. > > To get a good solder joint, the solder has to wet the things you are joining. > There are two barriers to the solder wetting metals. First, the solder has > to be molten as it touches the things to be joined. That generally means > that the things to be joined have to be at or above the temperature at which > the solder melts. Since most metals are so effective at conducting heat, > that generally means that large pieces of metal don't solder very well. You > can get around this by using the correct equipment. I have a soldering iron > intended for people to use to solder the lead channels used for stained > glass. It's got a honking big chunk of metal on the tip, which is why it > works for soldering things like PL-259's and whatnot, although I've pretty > much switched to crimp connectors for those. > > The other barrier to solder wetting the things you're soldering has to do > with the chemistry of metals. Metal atoms are highly reactive. So is > oxygen. So when a refined metal (consisting largely or exclusively of the > atoms of one or more metals and very little oxygen) comes in contact with > air, the two tend to combine and make a layer of oxide on the surface. > Solder does not wet metal oxides very well. So, if you're making something > that has to be soldered together, you have to remove all the oxides that you > can before you begin. There will still be some oxides on the surface that > will form between when you clean the metal and when you start soldering, so > solder is typically used with a material called flux to help deal with that. > Flux either comes with the solder or separately, but the flux is there to > help the solder wet the things to be soldered if there's a little bit of > oxide on those things. > > Some fluxes work better than others with some materials than others. > However, some materials, like aluminum, are so reactive that they require > special techniques to solder. I have never tried it, and maybe there are > techniques that can be used to solder to aluminum that didn't exist when I > last looked into it in the 1980's, but I know some methods that are supposed > to work. > >> On 10/1/2022 12:41 PM, Shannon Tassin via BVARC wrote: >> Happy Saturday All, >> >> I am working to improve my homemade vertical HF antenna project that I made >> several months back based on an ARRL magazine article. >> >> This washer will allow my ground stake to fit through the middle and gives >> me a nice surface area for attaching my 10 ground radials. It was a leftover >> from another project so I don’t recall exactly what metal it is. My problem >> is that I cannot seem to get the solder to stick to it. I am very much a >> beginner with soldering. >> >> What do I need to do differently? >> >> Thanks, >> Shannon Tassin >> K4SCT >> ________________________________________________ >> Brazos Valley Amateur Radio Club >> >> BVARC mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://mail.bvarc.org/mailman/listinfo/bvarc_bvarc.org >> Publicly available archives are available here: >> https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ > <20221001_170929.jpg> > <20221001_170920.jpg> > ________________________________________________ > Brazos Valley Amateur Radio Club > > BVARC mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.bvarc.org/mailman/listinfo/bvarc_bvarc.org > Publicly available archives are available here: > https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ ________________________________________________ Brazos Valley Amateur Radio Club BVARC mailing list [email protected] http://mail.bvarc.org/mailman/listinfo/bvarc_bvarc.org Publicly available archives are available here: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ ________________________________________________ Brazos Valley Amateur Radio Club BVARC mailing list [email protected] http://mail.bvarc.org/mailman/listinfo/bvarc_bvarc.org Publicly available archives are available here: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
