davedarkoSo for the last few weeks I had to solder with a discounter soldering station that I've bought for 15 Euros. It's basically a screwdriver, heated by the power of mains, hidden in a big clunky green case.
Before that I had a trusty Weller WM15L soldering iron with that I soldered all the SMD stuff and more, but especially with bigger thermal mass objects I ran into some problems. When I was noticing that the tip went from workable to bad and ugly, I tried to change the tip, but the heavily corroded screw just broke. I think I've paid 15-20 Euros for this soldering iron. In essence it also was a tiny screwdriver heated by mains, but a better one. It's also the same one that made me jump when I was soldering stuff in Marrakesh that might have been live. Scary throwback.
I was waiting to buy a hakko FX888 that was on sale on watterott for 130 Euros, but when the budget was there it was sold out - meh. So I ended up searching for hakko 936 clones instead and found one for 42 Euros. The important features for me were that the tip/iron were changeable and that I won't run out of spare parts, even though the hakko is not supported anymore, eBay is flooded with cheap stuff for it.
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Those are pretty horrible pictures. Before I got into microcontrollers and robots, I used a transformer soldering iron (pistol-shaped), and didn't listen to anybody telling me to buy anything else. That's what my father used back in the vacuum tube days (it has a nice black bakelite body). But today I wouldn't replace my pencil iron for anything else.
One good feature of that transformer iron, though, was that you just replaced the tips with a piece of copper wire.
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I should have added a trigger warning ;) my Dad had one of these too! But he now has weller station clone.
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Your Hakko936 clone was quite expensive. I did paid under 20€ for mine. This Hakko936 clone do work quite well for me. Although they do not have a power on LED by default (only one for heating).
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is your iron interchangeable? I found some cheaper stations with out the DIN connector.
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yes there is a din-like connector. Like these: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/1set-M16-16mm-5-Pin-Screw-Type-Electrical-Aviation-Plug-Socket-Connector/32617821257.html?ws_ab_test=searchweb201556_7,searchweb201644_2_505_506_503_504_10020_502_10001_10002_10017_10005_10006_10021_10003_10004_10022_10018_10...
I did got the soldering station from hobbyking.com.
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well I've ordered from a german retailer off of ebay, so it would have been a bit more expensive. Hobbyking sells them for 18EUR , ah damn. Nevermind, the sooner I'll get it the better.
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I think I have that very same green discounter soldering station. At the time it was 10€ and I just wanted to know how bad it would be ;)
I mostly use this iron and it works pretty well for me but at times it's either too hot or not hot enough so now I'm looking into building one like #Hakko 907 based Soldering Station.
Keep us updated on how you like the new one, would ya?
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will do :) I thought about building a clone for a while, but you need a soldering Iron to build a soldering station ;) that project looks great, that's the same soldering iron that fits on the hakko 936 clone :)
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lol, yeah there's a catch 22 :)
I already received the 907 handpiece clone and have to say that the tip it came with is quite loose on the heating element. If that's the case with yours you might want to consider the mod described here (in case you haven't seen it already).
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