I love the site and especially like your tutorials. The soldering ones, though, tend to be all mid-to-advanced level stuff, like SMD and reflowing.
Me, I’m having trouble soldering header pins onto a breakout board.
I finally got working connections, though they’re mostly pretty ugly. The behavior of the solder (lead free) seemed to me to be pretty random. Sometimes, it would melt instantly, sometimes i could hold it right up to the tip (your low-end analog station) for five minutes and not have it melt at all. When it did melt, it almost never acted the way i wanted it to.
My final design is going to involve ~100 through-hole solder connections, and that is scaring the crap out of me because I barely got seven made over a period of several days.
A simple tutorial with good explanations and pictures would go a really long way to making your products useful for beginners in addition to seasoned professionals.
It sounds like something is wrong with your solder, iron, or technique.
If possible I would start out with lead based solder. It is much easier to deal with.
But if you want to be lead free:
Make sure your soldering iron is hot enough. We run 750 degrees F for lead free through hole and SMT soldering.
Make sure your tip is clean. Really clean. Every time the iron comes out the stand you should wipe the tip clean on the wet sponge.
Lay the tip of the soldering iron flat on the pad and press it against the lead. Basically you want both the pad and the lead to heat up. Add a little bit of solder to the connection, not to the iron. The pad and lead will be hot and the solder will flow around the connection. This should take about 1 or 2 seconds.
My guess is that your soldering iron doesn’t get hot enough for the lead free solder. Or the tip is junk. Or you are using the wrong type of solder. Rosin core solder is the easiest to work with, but no-clean could also work.
Please describe your equipment and solder and perhaps we can help you further.