Soldering to Kapton bed heater traces?

[MutantGarage]

Anyone had success soldering to the conductors in a Kapton bed heater?

I've scraped off the polyimide and exposed the metal trace, but standard rosin flux and tin-lead solder do not take to it.

[Misha]

Could I ask why?

[MutantGarage]

Allowing use of 12V by splitting the circuits. Add  nodes 1/2 between the original terminals and use it as + and the original pads as - . I have 2 12V @ 10A heater circuits on my controller and a 24V heating pad. This lets me use it with my controller.

[Misha]

Cool idea, at one point I wanted to have two heaters on the bed.  One at just the center for small parts and a second larger one controlled by a switch when I need the whole bed.

[Alex]

I soldered a broken trace by sanding through the kapton. Then I bridged it with some solid copper wire. I just used standard rosin solder and don't remember doing anything special. I did turn up the heat on my station.

[MutantGarage]

Doesn't seem to want to stick on my MM2 bed heater, the metal is nice and shiny, I tried buffing it, seems to be solid silver color all the way through.

I see mention of Nickle Alloy used in Kapton heaters, but nothing clear on what solder to use. I tried 63-37 and 60-40 flux core and some RoHS lead-free with Silver. Also tried Chipquik and it's flux. The original joints almost look like they were cleaned with a strong acid from the way the Kapton looks etched around the solder wetted area. 

Have you ever looked at how many different kinds of solder there are? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solder

[MutantGarage]

Used my wife's stained glass soldering iron, some zinc chloride brush on flux and Silver solder (AgSnCu) http://www.canfieldmetals.com/stained_glass.htm took right to it.

[Larry Knopp]

that's been an adventure!

Wouldn't have thought it would have been that big of a deal...

Thanks for sharing.  (May come in handy down the road)

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