Novel soldering approach with pseudo TIG welder

Article By : Max Maxfield

Find out how a 100W power LED that boasts a 100 year life came to an early demise.

My friend Rick Curl just caused me to waste a few more minutes of my precious time by pointing me at this video from Big Clive at BigClive.com.

In this video, we see Big Clive experimenting with a 100W power LED that he claims boasts a 100 year life. Sad to relate, as we soon see, the LED in this video came to an early demise. As Big Clive so eloquently says: "…all the little chips inside have gone black now and they're not supposed to do that."

All I can say is that this video is excruciatingly painful to watch yet — much like an impending train wreck — you can’t drag your eyes away. The point where Big Clive starts his "TIG Welding" (at around the 1:00 minute mark) will be forever etched on my memory.

On the bright side, I did discover some useful nuggets of knowledge of which I was previously unaware, such as the fact that "With Power LEDS polarity doesn’t matter because they use bi-polar alternating watts" (this is something they inexplicably failed to teach me at university).

Furthermore, the comments to this video are instructive in their own right. As one viewer noted: "Everybody knows that TIG welding should be done in an atmosphere of pure helium which you didn't do otherwise your voice would have been higher." Dang, I should have spotted that myself!