Good write up mike. I had to do this when I swapped to my new midpipe, the O2 bungs were lower and didn't have enough play in the wire to get them screwed on.
Looks like we have the same soldering iron
Oh, and BTW, if you do a lot of electrical work, you can go to Home depot or something and buy a LB at a time of any kind of solder that you want, with or without lead, flux core, solid core, anything you'd like