LEDENGIN 10W soldering problems

[Ben Elion]

I hope we didn´t have a misunderstanding here caused by my unability to find the right words (and grammar) in English.
Your comments sound to me like you´ve been attacked personally, but this could be the language barrier.

Off course we didn´t solder them on the heatsink and I don´t want to take this discussion too far.
The Ledengins are the best option available for most everyone to get a superbright blade except Sunriders special passion

I´m very thankful to Tim offering these to us.
As an European I have no other advantage than the availability, pricing is higher because of the shipping costs and custom fee.

Now with the PC offering FoC, the amount of demanded multicoloured LEDs will surely raise.
There will be other inexperienced people who will have their problems with these.
What can happen in the worst case?
A wire could become loose after some hard hits and touch the housing, if it´s the positive you´ll get a short and the LED driver on the board is immediately fried.
This happened to me once too on my first attempts.
What can be done to prevent this?

Only three things:
Improve your (soldering) skills.
Electrically insulate the heatsink from the hilt, but this would prevent a good part of the thermal conduction as well.
Or a PCB which can be soldered more easy, oriented towards the competitors.

So now is the best time to go ahead, before more complaints will pop up.
The Ledengins are more difficult to solder than all other LEDs at the moment, that´s a fact.
So why not demanding more?
Another better PCB would make the life easier for all of us saber fans and Ledengins customers in general, leading to an improvement of their reputation.

[FenderBender]

Indeed, there is misunderstanding. I was not feeling attacked, nor was I attacking. I am simply at a loss for what to say at this point. I have given every tip for soldering these, and making the soldering easier, that I can. They are more difficult, yes. Could it be easier? Sure. I'm just not convinced that it is such a big deal that I would start a ruckus over it. So..I'm going to go with the first choice: Improve your soldering skills. I had to improve mine, and work on improving them everyday. Now, 99% of the time, I have zero issues soldering the LEDengins.

I have tried every multi die LED that I can find, nothing comes even remotely close to the LEDengin right now. I'll take the trade off of difficulty vs. brightness/saturation, ESPECIALLY at the price that we pay now for the LEDengins here. $30 down to $15? Yes please.

I also don't feel like LEDengin has a reputation problem. They are new to this arena (LED manufacturers), and have a bang up product and continue to work on it. It will probably take some time before we see everything we want from them in terms of their products. By then, who knows? We may not even be using this style of LED. So, it's really about using what you have available...today.

The other option is to find a PCB that would work and buy the emitter and solder it yourself. That, or make your own PCB. It can be done. If your wife has SMD certifications, maybe you can design a PCB that would work better for you.

I will say, that this problem is actually caused by the fact that the PCB/heatsink that the emitter is mounted on works REALLY well. And it should, these things generate some massive heat when pushed. In order to drain heat away from the emitter, the PCB has to be really efficient. Unfortunately, this means that it's a bit harder to solder to.

[Sunrider]

I think what is happening is probably avoidable if one is very careful about how stars are treated during soldering. When soldering it takes a while for the whole star to warm up to let the solder pad hot enough to flow solder. when the pads are hot like this the epoxy that holds them in place goes back to a more gooey flexible state. Then it is not hard to pull them up or mess them up especially if you iron is above 350C or so. They are delicate like traces on pcbs in general but they take much longer to heat up because the star will suck heat away so fast. This is the same reason you dont want a star mounted to a heat sink when soldering. The bigger the star or heat sink the more difficult and hard on the pads it is. You should see how long it takes the 40w 30mm star to warm up.