Even after reading Clay's instructions I didn't prep the surface for the solder lol. I guess I thought he meant you only needed to clean the nipple and I was attempting to solder the base to the bracket. Maybe I thought that because mine shows signs of corrosion and the bulb socket looks clean. Either way I'll be at this again tonight because without prepping the surface that solder would not take O,o Think I may get a chisel tip for my soldering iron too.

Thanks for the thread and helping me understand where I went wrong :0)

Great write up. Answered so many questions. I was unaware I needed to use flux if I had the 60/40 rosin core, but then I'm new to soldering and didn't do to well lol.

I also have several loose bulb sockets on my Surf Champ that occasionally give me trouble. I've ordered a few new sockets and plan on just replacing some of the bad ones. However the bonus tree has several sockets that are riveted to a strip and have been flickering. Replacing those doesn't seem like an option. So I decided to take the advice here and solder them. I replaced my cheap 40 watt Radio Shack soldering iron with a Weller gun. I picked up some flux and took a shot at doing this.

Each area was cleaned with emery paper ( a dremel would have been cleaner and faster) and then blown off. I removed the tree to solder the bases on my work bench. Then I installed the tree to complete the soldering of the wires to the tits. I ran the wires through the tabs to hold the wires in place as I soldered them. That helped quite a bit. Now they all light nicely. No flickering or dull lights.

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Yeah I used the 140 setting and it worked just fine. The flux also worked great. What I meant was installing new sockets. I am not quite sure how that would have been done. So soldering seemed the way to go.

Your write up was spot on and saved me a ton of aggravation and time.