Yesterday, after shielding the cavities of my PJ Player Mustang bass I attempted to start to rewire it to replace the glitchy toggle switch with a switchcraft one and swap some cables about to solve the issue with the volume dropping when rolling off the tone. My soldering iron is an oldish 30W one. Using this iron I found it impossible to reflow the factory solder at all and I had to cut the wires off the switch. I tried to desolder the bare leg of the capacitor from the tone pot using desoldering braid, but couldn't flow the solder at all.
I deduced that a higher powered iron is needed so I placed an amazon order for a 100W one which has buttons to adjust the power and a temperature readout, which seems to be standard now. This defaults to 350ºC and goes up to 500ºC. I found in various bits boxes, a pair of CTS 250kΩ audio pots, a 0.047uF orange drop capacitor and a pure tone socket, so I decided it would make sense to build a new loom. I couldn't remember where I stashed my push-back wire so I added some to my order. My order was delivered today.
The plan is to use a standard P bass circuit, replacing the pickup ground and signal with the ground and signal out from the switch.
I have now mounted the components on a cardboard template and will probably put the loom together tomorrow.
I have both old tin/lead solder — which was easy to use with my old iron, and newer lead free — which wasn't, so I will try to use the lead free with the new iron.
My question is - what temperature do you use when soldering? Is the default 350ºC likely to be hot enough? Is there a disadvantage to upping the temperature beyond what is needed?
Also why are Americans unable to pronounce solder properly?