soldering work station notes

Hi, today I'm going to make some notes on my workstation area, so anyone trying to follow along at home won't make the same mistakes I did. First, we'll talk about strategy a bit, and prep work; this is important, in order to limit the time the soldering gun is actually on, causing a burn risk in your house.

Wire use strategy
I actually cut out 3"x6" card stock, and taped a bunch of paper tabbing wire to it, in a dry run, and made the following determinations for my 6 cell by 6 cell configuration, there will be 6 cells with positive wires sticking out half an inch, and 6 cells with negative wires sticking out half an inch. That left 24 cells with a 'normal' wiring, so before I laid even one cell on the panel, I would need the following for each panel

6 cells wired on just the negative side, with tabbed wires sticking out just long enough to connect to the bus (roughly 3 3/8 in).
6 cells wired on the positive side with tabbed wires sticking out 1/2 inch, and 'regular length' wires on the negative side. (roughly 2 7/16 in)
24 cells with 'regular length' wires on the positive side. (roughly 6 1/16 in)

I wanted to do both panels at once, so multiply the above number by 2, and pre-cut all my tabs
24x3 3/8" tabbed wires
24x2 7/16" tabbed wires
96x6 1/16" tabbed wires

Once that was done, I set up my work area with a flux pen, solder and the cheapest 30 watt soldering gun that is sold at Radio Shack. The tabbed wire is pre-coated with solder, and over time as my technique got better, I was able to complete the connection without using my roll of solder, but in the beginning, a little solder helped a lot.

MISTAKES I MADE
1. Always use the flux pen, otherwise the wires will pop off really easily.
2. I used a felt-covered table, and cracked a cell pressing down too hard, as the cell flexed inward. I switched to a flat table, covered with a thin cloth to prevent scratches, and that worked really well.

doing all the work of tabbing the cells took about 10 hours, spread across 3 days. All that's left is to attach the cells to each other within the solar panel, which I have yet to modify, since the 3-inch by 6-inch measurement was inaccurate. I plan on doing that tomorrow evening (meeting with the district manager of USSD this evening, on continued plans to become a sensei -- they typically charge $8000 for 'instructor school'), completing the solar panel Friday evening, and actually exposing it to the sun on Saturday..