Okay, now the fun starts. Get your soldering iron up to temperature, touch it to the connection (I like to keep the tip below the connection), and touch the heated connection with your solder. This pic has a long exposure, and you catch me moving the solder into place. But the iron is held steady–it’s been there heating the connection up for a few seconds already.

making good solder joints takes some practice

With that done, just repeat for the other leg. If you forgot the heat shrink tubing, you never find out until you’ve done both connections. You can slide the terminals out of the plastic pin header on the other end, and slide the tubing up from that end, but it’s less work if you put it on the wire first.

once again we soder the connection

the connections need only a small amount of solder

You can see the red heat shrink tubing in the second pic above. If you can, use polyolefin tubing, it looks a lot nicer than what I used here. Next, shrink up the tubing to protect and insulate your connections. I use a heat gun, but a butane lighter will work in a pinch.

the heat shrink is on, and our LED passes the test

polyolefin heat shrink looks less glossy and more even than this

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