Soldering blocks

At the risk of stating the obvious.............. though it did not occur to me till today.

After some time of using my soldering block it becomes pitted and contaminated with stray bits and pieces, making balls becomes a bit hit and miss if I cannot find a very flat bit, they slump into a puddle and stick solid and various other soldering jobs needing a nice flat surface are made difficult.

Well today I went at an old with with an orbital sander for five minutes and lo and behold a nice new flat surface. I realise you cannot keep doing this as it will eventually become thinner to the point of not protecting that which is below it but it certainly extends the life of a block before it is only fit for being chopped up to use as supports.

Well that sounds like a neat idea; I have a surfeit of bits of block. For balls though I only use charcoal cos I can't make neat divots in the other stuff.

lol at further risk this time of sounding smutty, I prefer my balls to have that little flat bit on the bottom, so tend not to make the little divots to keep them perfectly round as I find if they are too round I end up having to file a flat bit on them for soldering.

I will withstand the temptation to comment on your balls...

I suppose the flat bits come in very handy if you use your balls for granulation (I don't have the patience for that I'm afraid)

It's rained so much, that I recently did this indoors by rubbing two blocks together, like it said somewhere -a pretty dusty experience. Next time I would use an outdoor paving stone as my abrasive. Dennis.

Best do it at night Dennis, you know what it is like these days, if the local council think you are taking advantage of their paving stones for nothing you will be slapped with some kind of fine/charge, that is of course if they don't throw you in jail for endangering the health of Londoners at large with all the dust.