Do I need helping hands for soldering? (Answer 2024)

Helping hands are essential tools for soldering. They hold the circuit board in the exact position that we require. So, to be very straightforward, yes you do need helping hands for soldering.

Hi, I am Abbas. If you were looking for a straight answer to the question, “Do I need helping hands for soldering?”, then you have it. Now, in the rest of the article, I share what helping hands are, what types are best for which type of soldering situation, what makes soldering helping the best, and much more.

I am not perfect, nor this short article is going to be. This is just my limited knowledge try to help you.

I hope you will enjoy it.

Table of Contents

Do I need helping hands for soldering?

One of the most important things in electronics is soldering. We do soldering for repairing old circuits. We do it for PCB circuit prototyping and much more.

The milestone of a well finished board depends on a lot of factors. First, It depends on personal skill. Like how professional you are, and how much experience you have.

Secondly, it depends on the tools you have in your lab. Certainly, you can’t be professional in a day. You have to practice soldering for a lot of time. But with the right tools, this learning journey can be made effortless, and the time span can be shortened.

You know, if you don’t equip yourself with the right tools. Chances are you will have bad finished boards. These bad boards not only look bad, but they have the following issues that can totally change the supposed output of your board.

Add unwanted noise
Sparks and glitches
Overheat
Component damaging
Open, short, and loose connections
Extra conduction or transmission radiation
Fail to operate properly
Extra wastage of useful resources
Wastage of human efforts and time

You see, not having the right tools may affect your outcomes. To avoid the above to a certain level we can have high quality soldering station as well as some soldering accessories.

There are many useful soldering accessories for soldering. But the one we are interested in today is the soldering helping hands.

Now, I think, the question “Do I need helping hands for soldering?” can answer itself. Yes of course you require soldering helping hands. Because it helps to have a well finished circuit board.

Let’s try to understand what are these helping hands and how are they going to help us in various soldering situations.

What are soldering helping hands

Soldering hands are basically arms that hold the circuit which we want to solder. They are super useful.

Soldering helping hands requirment — Soldering helping hands

In a more efficient way, these hands are mechanical arms that help us hold the circuit boards at our convenient height and length so that we can solder a circuit with our best possible effectiveness.

Just to be clear, soldering helping hands are not the game changer (compare to personal soldering skill and quality of soldering station) but add so much value to our soldering outputs.

Soldering hands importance

Above we try to see what are these hands all about. We try to see some definition. Now, let’s try to talk about the importance of these helping hands.

Improve soldering experience

Without a doubt helping hands makes your soldering experience much better. You don’t have to hold the circuits or put something heavy on them so that they cannot move while you solder them. This is not a good experience. If you do soldering for a long time, it will make your life miserable.

In such a situation, soldering helping hands come very effective and make your soldering time much more fun and relaxing.

Free our hands

You have two hands. And when you solder you use one hand for solder wire and the other for soldering iron. There is no way to hold the circuit at the same time.

Thus, these helping arms free your hands for doing effective soldering without worrying to hold the circuit board.

LED holding

Some electronics parts are very tiny such as SMDs. To work with them, you need a proper LED setup.

do I require helping hands for soldering

With soldering arms, you can attach an LED. Some helping hands come with their own LED lighting system making our soldering experience much more effective.

Magnifying glass holding

Similar to LED you can also attach a magnifying glass to these helping hands. These magnifying glass helps to zoom in on the tiny connection so that you don’t make any mistake while soldering.

Safe

In soldering, you are working with a hot iron. If something goes wrong you can seriously harm yourself.

The second thing is when you are not using helping hands, the smoke from the soldering is coming directly into your face. This smoke is terrible for the lungs if exposed for a long time. What helping hands do, is they keep the circuit away from your face.

ESD protection

Some electronics components get damaged when you touch them with your hands. Soldering helping hands minimize that risk to a much more acceptable level.

Best helping hands for beginners

Now, as a new person, choosing the best soldering helping hands may be confusing. You may not have the right questions to research, don’t know about the proven brands, and perhaps many other questions.

To help you with this, I have a dedicated post that you may find helpful. It is linked below. But the straight answer to this one is, KOTTO Soldering Helping Hands (Amazon link), you should definitely check it out.

#07 Best Soldering Helping Hands (for Electronics)

Conclusion

In this article, we try to see what are helping hands, why they are important and do you really need soldering helping hands.

Well, in short summary. Helping hands are mechanical arms that help us hold the circuit the way we require. We can hold the circuit at any angle, at any height that best suits us.

These helping are really significant as they make our hands free, improve our soldering experience, led holding, safety, and much more. By using these hands we do soldering with much effectiveness.

In the last, I would say. The answer to, Do I need helping hands for soldering? is simple. Yes, you do require soldering helping hands.

So that is it. That is all I have for you to share about this topic. I hope you really enjoyed it.

Thank you and have a grateful life.