Soldering cable ends for AC terminations

If the connection gets hot enough to melt solder you have made a really lousy connection!

You're right. Maybe I should also ask if soldering the wire ends has any benefits or should I just stick the bare copper after treating them with something like Walker SST?

I always use solder.
1...It keeps loose strands of copper from shorting out.
2...It provides a "soft" metal to clamp down on, which I think improves the connection.

Solder adds impurities, No solder is best.

mapleleafs3, and where do those impurities go? And aren't they 'flushed out' by the current after some time?
At any rate, I don't see where it makes a difference if the solder is just at the protuding end of the connection where there is no current.
Bob P.

Solder is bad period

>>"Solder is bad period"<<
[Mapleleafs3]
>>>>>>>>>>>>

Name me an electronic component out there that is not full of it! Solder that is.....
Solder is the electrical bonding agent that holds all the electrical connections together. Printed circuit boards could not exist without the use of solder to electrically connect electrical components to them.

Where solder can cause a problem is where it is used for tinning the ends of speaker cables and such. Solder does have a tendency to corrode on the outside where exposed to air and moisture. Beneath the surfice of the solder this is not a problem.

Jea48...I have no problem with solder in audio equipment, but there is electronic equipment that uses another method which sounds unlikely but actually works very well. I am thinking of "wire wrap". The soft copper wire is twisted around a hard sharp-cornered pin, while under tension using a special tool. This method was used for thousands of connections in the electronics assembly of a missile inertial guidance system that I worked on. Very reliable, even under extreme vibration during missile flight, and unaffected by nearby nuclear explosions, where solder would be melted by X-rays.

Eldartford, I agree with your post 100%. The method you describe was used in TVs for years, and found in some audio equipment as well.

As you know the old tube audio gear of the pre circuit board, the wire was held securely around a post or through a hole and doubled back for a metal to metal contact. The solder was only used to hold it in place. Solder has improved greatly. And as you know, solder is the only thing that holds resistors, caps, small power transformers, ect, to the circuit traces of a circuit board.
Jim

>>"and unaffected by nearby nuclear explosions, where solder would be melted by X-rays."<<
[Eldartford]
>>>>>>>

Eldartford, is it true that the Russians used vacuum tubes in their military equipment instead of transistors because tubes were not affected by the electromagnetic effect of a nuclear explosion?
Jim

Jea48...I doubt that the Russians did things much different from us. It would be quite impossible to implement anything but the most primitive guidance system using tubes. Our (US) late 1950's guidance system (Polaris Mk 1) was all solid state. Later, when radiation hardening became an issue, many features, most obviously, some shielding, were incorporated, but tubes were never considered. Many features of the hardware design, and the software which runs in it, have been developed to provide immunity to high levels of radiation.

There is one case where a tube was used in a recent design, and seriously considered for the most recent design. That is a Vidicon (optical imaging tube) used in space to sight on a star in order to correct for errors accumulated during the boost phase of flight. It was difficult to develop a CCD with the necessary radiation tolerance. Immunity to radiation was the only advantage of the vidicon.