Silver solder--what wattage soldering iron?

IME, this is somewhat delicate and you need a better iron. I can recommend Weller, with a 1/32 tip about 650-700 degrees F. This kind of tool is what provides that "simple, quick touch" solder.

Mingles, that one even looks like a Weller. For that price it would be hard to beat. It would be nice if it had a temp readout, but that would probably drive the cost up. :-) Heck, that would make a great backup iron.

Yep, I had one of those Rat Shack irons a while back. It is not the power rating that makes it not perform, it is just a cheap tool. I found it required longer contact time to heat anything up, then found that the soft material the tip is made from doesn't last very long and they don't sell replacement tips for it. I mean the tip literally burned away to a stub. In honesty, the poor thing was probably overworked with all of the projects I've done in the last few years.

With cartridge clips and fine wire you want something that will do the job fast so there is less chance of the heat traveling. Just my .02 based on my experiences.

I can highly recommend the Cardas silver solder. I bought it from Michael Percy Audio, but it can be found other places. The Cardas solder does seem to take a bit more heat, but once it begins to flow it works beautifully.

Glad you found an iron to get you by, Will. I can offer that if you get accustom to checking your solder joints with a lupe or strong magnifying glass you will teach yourself a lot about how it is working for you.

Anyone want to comment on this statement about this brand of silver solder? I realize there is some marketing going on, but I can't say if this is bollocks or not. I am simply a satisfied user of the product.

"Some of the best connections are soldered connections. The problem is only one type of soldered connection is truly a joint, most are as the word states, a connection. Many solders, such as the popular 60/40, are a slurried mixture of Tin and Lead. In making the joint, the Tin/Lead mixture melts, but as it solidifies it does so one metal at a time. It goes into a slurry state where one metal is liquid and the other is very small solid particles. Next, the other metal solidifies, and creates a multitude of small connections. This type of connection is not particularly favorable or permanent. When a phone company had to use this type of solder on their main frames, every joint had to be reheated once a year to insure reliability. Even then, the "cold joint" was a common occurrence. Noisy or open joints were the main cause of failure in early printed circuit boards and electronic equipment until sometime in the mid-sixties or early seventies. Then it was learned that eutectic joints were perfectly reliable. By the mid-seventies or early eighties most electronic equipment was being soldered with Eutectic solder (63/37). The reliability of printed circuit boards went up nearly 1000%, and solid state audio gear began to sound almost tolerable. Today, all printed circuit boards use Eutectic solder. The melting point of a Eutectic solder is lower than any of its component parts, so there is no slurry state in these solders. They solidify as one creating an actual solder joint. The only wires used in high-end audio are Copper and Silver, so George Cardas developed an ultra pure Tin/Lead/Silver/Copper eutectic or Quad-Eutectic solder. This solder is now used in the vast majority of all high-end cables and equipment. Properly done, Quad-Eutectic joints reliably provide the best sound with the lowest noise and contact resistance. (The above was taken in part and paraphrased entirely from George Cardas' paper Soldered vs. Crimped Connections). "