Soldering Grounds to Fender Amp Chassis and Installing New AC Cord

You may recall the unsoldering of the can capacitor on the Vibro Champ a few posts ago.

I don't do them a lot so I usually rely on the method I wrote about. But no more.

I also needed to replace the AC line cord.  The ground is soldered to the chassis, so I figured it was About Time that I sprung for a big powerful soldering iron.

So here it is - it's a Weller SP175.  The '175' stands for the wattage.  I almost got a 120 watt iron, which probably would have been fine, but I figured I should just get a pretty high powered one.

The only downside, as you can see, is it's big.  If you speak Imperial measurement, it's over 11 inches long.  That's about 28 centimeters by my estimation.  Almost as big as the Vibro Champ chassis!

 Here's the ground I'm going to unsolder.  The typical big blob of solder.

The iron heats up very quickly - about 2 minutes and it was ready to go.  It gets HOT - you can feel the heat if you're using it in a vertical position.  You also need a good holder to set it in when it's hot - the flimsy "stand" that comes with it isn't particularly safe.

It's also so big that you need to be careful not to touch other leads when you use it - it will melt them instantly.  Fortunately, I didn't do that.

As with any soldering iron, the tip surface area and keeping it tinned and clean are the keys.  The tip on this puppy is about half an inch (13mm) wide, so it's idea for this work.

About 15 seconds and the joint was melted!  Where have you been all my life?

Here's the new AC cord in place.  I was able to easily solder the ground to the chassis.

Still waiting for my new speaker from Weber, but I have a couple more things to do in the interim.