Why is the shaft of a soldiering iron burning hot bare metal instead of being insulated?

Factual Questions
21

This image itself is somewhat misleading, as I have never seen an M-16 with wooden parts. Maybe some customized civilian variant is like this, but it would be an anomaly.

Edit, looking it up they absolutely do exist, but it’s in no way the type of standardized item that would typically be used in a schematic diagram of that type.

22

Yes, the insulating material would eventually heat up, but it wouldn’t necessarily transfer heat as quickly as bare metal. It wouldn’t have the same burn risk. For example, a silicone baking sheet doesn’t transfer heat very well. The sheet is as hot as the metal baking pan, but the silicone transfers heat so slowly that you can safely hold it right out of the oven. The baking sheet will burn you pretty much as soon as you touch it. Perhaps they could have some kind of silicone ridges or something along the metal of the soldering icon so that it wouldn’t be a burn risk but the metal could still dissipate heat.

I suspect that since soldering irons are things typically used by engineers and experienced people, the manufacturers don’t want to spend extra if they don’t have to. If the general public used them more often, they might need to have more safety features.

23

You may want to take that up with Encyclopedia Britannica, then.

24

Nah, he meant that soldiers are rough & tough and can hold the iron by the hot part…

25

Plastic woodgrain and/or illustrating that those parts are basically cosmetic (yes, the stock etc. have ergonomic function but the gun will fire fine without them).

26

After thinking about it a bit more, I am going to challenge this statement. When you are soldering, you need to position the tip of the iron on joints nestled amongst a 3D arrangement of components. You need to hold the iron several inches back from the tip in order to reach all but the most trivial of joints. In my case I am usually soldering very tiny components beneath a microscope or magnifier, I need the space between the tip and my fingers in order to not block sight of what I am doing.

So the answer to why they don’t make soldering irons that you can hold close to the tip is that most people wouldn’t want to.