Okay,
Alrighty...
There's the soldering iron, the wire, the solder, and the work.
How the hell do you guys do it.(I was only born with *two* hands).
Others have suggested "third hand" devices or mini-vises. If
you're in a rush (or can't afford such toolery right now),
improvise; stack books or whatever to hold the wire in place, and do
whatever you need to so that the work holds still.
I just had to join three Cat-5 patch cords together to make an
ethernet cable long enough to reach (they were all I had on hand),
and without the right tools; bench vise etc.) so I did the
book-stacking trick, tweaking things so that the wires I wanted to
join were touching, for each friggin' pair of wires. Strip, tin,
stack, tweak, cut and slip on heatshrink, solder, heatshrink,
re-tweak, etc. Sixteen solder joints, five minutes from first strip
to plug-n-pray. Worked fine.
Oh, yeah; practice.
And if I'm lucky enough to bring everything to the exact same
spot(which is a crap shoot) the solder is either not melting, or
melting too fast so that I'm chasing little balls of solder(like it's
mercury) around the point it's was supposed to harden.
What kind of solder are you trying to use, and how hot is your
iron? Tinning the parts to be soldered before actually trying to
solder them together does help as other have said, but make sure you
have decent flux-cored solder and the right iron.
Little solder balls usually indicates inadequate/no flux or a
too-cold iron; flux cleans off the inevitable oxide layer on metals
which solder will not stick to, and you must heat the work (or wire)
to the point that the flux melts out of the solder onto the work
first as you touch the solder to the work. Then as the solder melts
it flows easily onto the work.
If the insulation just starts to melt, your iron's hot enough. ;>)
Someone have a video?
Prolly one out there somewhere, but nothing beats practice.
Mark L. Fergerson