Souldering

      After reading the safety instructions in preparation for soldering, my lab partner, Ethan, and I started by cutting a red wire and a black wire from a spool to hopefully connect to a battery using soldering techniques.   I tried to strip the wire only a few centimeters from the edge so that I wouldn't strip too much off, but there wasn't enough wire to make loops through the holes on the tabs of the power jack and apparently if there's not enough extra wire, you start melting the rubber on the wire.   Evidently, this is not conducive to either conductivity or the health of the solderers.
      After stripping some more rubber off of the wire, I discovered that it is very hard to keep all of the little copper wires together and Ethan suggested that we presolder the wires to keep them together and to make the soldering to the connector easier.   So we put a bit of solder on the wire before we tried to fold the copper around the connector.   After the presoldering was done, we hooked the black wire around the outside of the connector and bent the wire inward.
      Ethan held the connector still with pliers while I soldered the wire to the connector.   Soon after the soldering was done, Ethan pointed out that the part of the wire with the rubber protector was now on the outside edge of the connector and that if we tried to fit the plastic covering over the connector with the wire on it that it would not fit.   Then I learned how to desolder.
      The two methods that we used are soaking up the solder with what appeared to be a copper braid and melting the solder.   First we tried the soaking up method which we placed the braid over the solder and heating up both with the soldering gun.   This proved to be somewhat tedious and stressed the importance of not putting too much solder on the wire to begin with.   Once we had soaked up a significant amount of solder with the braid, we decided it was relatively safe to try and heat up the solder enough to pull the wire off of the power jack.  We had relatively more success with the second method in terms of actually detaching the wire from the power jack.
      After disconnected the old solder we attached the black wire from the inside out and soldered it to the jack. then we connected the red wire from the inside out and soldered it to the tab of the power jack.   When we presoldered the tips of the wires, Ethan used a method of placing the wire and solder to the solder gun instead of the opposite.   This was useful because we didn't have to use the helping hand thingies or trust someone else to hold things still and/or burn the holder.   Then we put the plastic cover onto the wire before we soldered the ends of the wire to the connector that we would use to plug the connector to the breadboard.   Lastly, we put clear, hot glue around the wires attached to the connectors so that the exposed wires would never touch and short circuit.   When we were done with this first bit, it looked something like this:

      The second half went much smoother and we achieved the soldering of the other jack with generally more timeliness and immediate success.   Following all of the actual soldering came time for the testing.   Fortunately there weren't any surprises and when the connector was plugged into the breadboard and the battery was connected to the other end of the wires, the red light on the breadboard lit up.   Our magnificently successful test  looked like this:

Here's a picture of the soldering on both jacks, which are plugged together: