Perfectly possible if you have the right sort of iron.
I have an Antex 100W iron for my stained glass work.
I think that gets hot enough for heavy work like you mention.
Good luck.
I should try to avoid things like WW2 hand grenades, though.
Thatās a beast JBā¦:shock:
My soldering iron is a 15 watt Antexā¦But I can solder a gnats balls into the eye of a needle without burning the hairs offā¦
This is a useful piece of kit when you are in the field. About Ā£30 squid.
Portasol Gas Soldering Iron
RS Stock No.:
600-234
Mfr. Part No.:
10181060
Brand:
Portasol
Oh you need it for 60/40 solder and thereās often quite a lot of soldering to do.
The iron wasnāt too expensive if I recall. Presently only about Ā£15, and it was less when I bought it.
Sounds good Besoeker, The bloke who comes to service our boiler has one and when I saw it I thought Iāve got to get me one of those. It would be great for soldering stuff in the car without the need for long extension cables getting trapped in the door, and burning holes in the seatsā¦It has been done!..
That sounds like a very interesting hobby JBā¦:surprised:
When I first used a slobbering iron, it was whilst making a toy metal boat during my O-Level Metalwork class. The iron had a wooden handle at one end (the end you held onto 
) and a gert big lump of shaped copper on the other end of a rod that you heated up in a small firebox.
Gas smoldering irons are great. They run on liquified gas, the same stuff that you put in cigarette lighters, and there is a striker built into the cap so you donāt need to carry matches or a separate lighter.
Mine has a removeable tip that can be replaced with a tiny blowtorch attachment, and a little wire stand to rest it on when you are setting the job up or letting the iron cool down.
You can also get rechargeable irons as well. These were for working where intrinsically safe devices had to be used such as near fuel and gas supply lines, or on static sensitive devices (SSD).
We also had mains or 110V irons with an earthed tip for SSD work, and ones where you could dial up the temperature you needed depending on the solder melting temperature.
Then we went over to lead-free solder which personally I found harder to use because it didnāt seem to run as well.
Iām surprised anyone is using a gas powered iron around a boiler (unless it is all electric or itās being used outside) instead of a battery powered one. :shock:
I still have a small (mains electric) soldering iron somewhere, which I have used for small jobs like electrical connections.
I also have a gas soldering iron, as you described which runs on cigarette lighter gas, though Iām not sure where it is now. Its only disadvantage is that the gas runs out! Of course, having a can of gas handy, it can easily be recharged.
As for solder, I avoid lead-free like the plague. 60/40 solder is the best in my book: easy to use and strong when cold. In fact, it is very similar to organ pipe metal and such things have stood the test of time even over centuries.
Radio Rentals supplied us with Adcola soldering irons. 240v for the houses, 24v for benchwork. They worked well.
When I went self-employed, I bought a Weller mains iron for use in houses, plus a soldering gun. The soldering gun was used for soldering that needed quite a bit of heat and where delicate soldering wasnāt required.
It had another use too. The transformer in it has quite a strong magnetic field. Strong enough to use for degaussing the shadow mask in colour TV CRTs. The idea was to do the degaussing fairly quickly before the soldering tip glowed red hot. 
Iāve still got that soldering gun but donāt use it for either purpose anymore.
For bench work, I had a Weller TCP 24v 50w iron. A super iron it was too. A magnetic bit that gave it temperature control. It worked for many years but went wrong shortly after I stopped work. I bought an Antex 660TC to replace it. It has its own transformer with a temperature dial. I use this now and itās OK but not a patch on the Weller.
Solder wick was/is essential for repair work. You had to be able to remove components without damaging the print and solder wick was the stuff to use. For solder removal that didnāt need so much care, there was the solder sucker. It got nicknamed the āfoop-tahā because of the noise in made when sucking the solder up. 
Good soldering and print care is a skill all on its own donāt you think?
Edit: Forgot to mention flux remover to make the print look nice after changing components.
Thatās interesting. I assume that with a built-in transformer it would have been quite heavy.
I had considered getting a transformer to vary the heat of my Antex iron. Iām assuming that I could insert it between the mains supply and the cable of the iron itself, but Iām not sure whether thatās possible.
I did try to reduce the heat of the soldering iron by moving the tip out about an inch or two, which was quite easy to do, to give me a little more control. I read that somewhere. However, it didnāt make a great deal of difference.
Yes, Iām sure.
Many of our variable speed drive systems are in suites. About a dozen or more usually. The individual drives are front and back so wall sockets for soldering irons can be a bit of a pain with leads trailing like spaghetti. Hence the gas soldering irons!
Not too heavy and the transformer had to be right next to the glass screen (metal shadow mask just behind it) for the degaussing to work. The trouble is that the copper bit heated up enough to melt solder in a few seconds, so a quick degauss was desirable.
Here is the sad state of my soldering equipment. The soldering gun doesnāt even have a bit in it. The big orange thing is the solder sucker. It looks like a toy but it works well. One advantage to the bright colour was that it never got left behind in customers houses. Stood out like a sore thumb when packing the tools away. 
Edit: The 24v Weller with the magnetic tip that I mentioned ran off a big mains isolating transformer that had a 24v tapping. Although the iron has gone, Iāve still got the transformer.
Well done! You must be well into the tidying up stage now? Do you think you will be heading to the nearest field before Christmas?
Some really good posts about soldering chaps. I agree with JB and Fruitcake about the lead in the solder, there are just some things that are necessary. I mainly use flux cored 18 gauge solder for work on the veroboard, I find the antex 15watt just about right for the intricate work, but the Weller in Martās photo is exactly the same as the one I use for the larger jobs. I used to salvage parts from broken electronic appliances and together with donations gratefully received from Besoeker 
I have created a very comprehensive collection of Resistors, capacitors, transformers and other various sundries.
I enjoy plumbing jobs around the house, but a butane blowtorch is the preferred method of heat with piping, and some heavy gauge solder.
Thanks Mart, Iāve been fitting in working on the detector with Christmas shopping, erecting outside lights and indoor decorations. After doing some further testing, which is producing results better than expected. It can be used with a speaker, or headphones. Although the speaker is more than capable of providing a satisfactory tone, the headphones are brilliant. Iāve been designing an enclosure out of MDF today, so with a bit of luck I might be able to cut out the pieces tomorrow, although an early morning run, and a haircut will be taking precedenceā¦ There is still the search coil to streamline and fit to the shaft.
I doubt it will be functional before Christmas, itās the thinking and design that takes the timeā¦I try to account for all eventualities.
You might be interested in these photos I took with the digital microscope Martā¦The finished circuitā¦
I think the pictures from the microscope are better than those I took with the camera. This last shot was taken with the camera, although I might not have got the lighting rightā¦
When I was eight or so, the council put in new street lights and Teed the power off an underground cable. They dug a trench to run the cable, about the diameter of my (adult) wrist, along the side of the road and made the Tee joint in the pavement by the side of our next-door neighbours hedge.
They cut a piece out of the existing cable, and laid the two ends plus the new cable into the bottom half of a T-shaped clay tray/half-pipe sort of jobby before baring the ends and then applying paste that I now realise was probably flux.
They then put a metal pot onto a gas burner and started bunging large sticks of solder into it. Once it was all melted they got a ladle and poured the solder into the clay jobby before putting the top half on.
Then they got another bucket and cut open a tin cube of pitch before melting that on the burner, then poured it all over the clay ensuring the ends and the joints were sealed.
Filling in the hole was just as much fun, using a dirty great road thumber that was effectively a single-cylinder motorbike engine with a huge lump of metal attached to the con-rod.
The operator pulled a trigger, it fired, shooting the top half of the machine up into the air. The piston and metal lump retracted whilst the whole thing was still rising before it all came down with a reverberating thump. The ādriverā would steer it by pulling or pushing it whilst it was air-born.
Steel toed boots were essential.
Now, how big a smouldering iron do think you would need to do that job?
Ah yes, I remember that soldering gun now Iāve seen a picture. I think I might have had one a long time ago. The bit that fits in the end is quite narrow and the bottom half curves upward to meet a small ābusiness endā.
No the transformer I was thinking of would be to reduce the mains voltage slightly, rather than down to 24V, to reduce the heat of my existing soldering iron.
Soldering on an industrial scale Fruitcakeā¦:shock:
Iāve been handling leaded solder (with my bare hands) for years now, and Iām not xsdahl afddfrv rkgvkwv wvsvmā¦