Cordless soldering tool reviewed

The ColdHeat Cordless Soldering Tool promises to help you quickly make solder joins in small-scale applications, such as jewelry repair and electronics work, without the hassle of waiting for a corded soldering iron to heat up.

This tool fits nicely in your hand. After loading it up with four AA batteries and inserting the tool’s tip, you turn the tool on. This flips on a white LED to illuminate your job, but doesn’t heat up the tip. The tip is made of two pieces of material that conduct electricity, separated so that they don’t touch. The tip heats up when both halves of the tip touch something conductive, such as the metal parts you want to solder. It works with conventional fine solder and doesn’t need to be tinned.

When I was soldering small-gauge wire onto LEDs, in an effort to make a string of tiny Christmas lights, I found that the tip heated up in just a couple of seconds, and I could make good joints quickly and easily. But when I moved to connecting a bundle of 15 wires at one junction, a task my trusty pencil soldering iron can easily handle, the ColdHeat couldn’t deliver enough heat to make the join possible. I also couldn’t solder a pair of 10-gauge wires together, which were much larger than the wires I used in my Christmas lights.

This is a good tool for light work, but because you have to touch both sides of the tip to the workpiece, it isn’t useful for small-scale electronics for which you may only be able to get one side of the tip into the tiny joint.

The ColdHeat Cordless Soldering Tool is sold at Canadian Tire for approximately $30.