Stupid mistake while soldering

I believe this is the right forum if not forgive me

Soooo ..... I made a really dumb mistake while I was soldering last night and was hoping someone could help me. I have some knowledge of electronics but not enough to troubleshoot. It is just enough to be dangerous.

Anyway Last night I was removing some blown caps from a power supply board. While soldering I made a big mistake and cant believe I did it. I put the last bit of a solder reel on my soldering iron to remind me to buy more. Well I forgot to remove it. When I was desoldering that little reminder (solder wrapped around my iron cord) touched the board. When it did that it most have touched leads of a component. Small flash and made a pop noise. In a visual inspection of the board I did not see any blown caps or sign of damage. I have not tested the board with the new caps yet because I want to waste them if I fired the board. Could it be possible that this discharged one of the caps?

I was hoping someone could either guide me in the right direction on how to test the board to find a bad component or let me know what stupid thing I did and what might have happened. I have a multimeter at hand but not really sure how to follow the path to find the possible bad guy.

Thank you and I appreciate your help.

That flash and associated pop noise is very likely because the solder wire shorted out the charged up Main smoothing cap. If the power supply was off at the time no damage should have been caused.

Thanks tvtech, I thought it might have been a discharge but was not sure.

Good news you haven't been harmed !

Yesterday, a cap popped next to me. It was a bad quality one.

Anyway, what I do when dealing with power supplies for example, is that when I shut off the computer.. I unplug the power-cord, the cord from the screen too (because it's live), I remove EVERY cable (keyboard and mouse don't count, because they get their power from the computer).

Then I hit the "Power On" button to dissipate any remaining charges. When I do that, the fan starts turning a bit, as there are some capacitors which are still charged. You never know.

And when I want to touch a cap, I usually have a resistor across it to flush it so to speak.

I wouldn't be so ready to call it just the solder, you very well could have blown a I.C. regulator. If the regulator is 3 volts and the stored voltage in the caps is 5 or 12 volts with no current regulation Poof.

What you could do is voltage checks and resistance checks (not at the same time of course).

Find out what the power supply wattage is. You can then put a light bulb of of 15 watts in series with the power cord. If when you plug it in, and it is bright then then try 30-40 watts.
if you try the same wattage as the power supply and it too is bright, then you do have a short somewhere and that's because you are dividing the voltage drop in half (one half to the bulb and the other half to the power supply) so the bulb should be no more than half the usual brightness. If it is, then you may be OK.
This is called a dim bulb test, and is used in vintage radio repairs.