I had thought that tinning the iron tip with a bit of solder would be sufficient, but I kept hitting problems where the solder would refuse to seep onto the surface properly. The additional ingredients in this seem to solve that issue. Get one of those balls of coiled brass too, of course: tip tinner, then the brass, then solder. Takes a little longer to repeat this process every now and then, but saves a lot of time in the long term if you never need to correct a failure.