New Soldering Station

#1

Hi Guys,

Given the last few months of conversations about the soldering irons, I do believe the Hakki’s are not really up for the constant use and the Antex lasted a couple of weeks. I am hoping it’s not that we are abusing them too much !!
Either way I took the decision to invest in a commercial quality iron (albeit second hand) to see how we go.

The Weller is a professional level setup and the iron is the WSP-80 which is the professional pencil iron with a hugely powerful element.

Please don’t wind the temperature up too high, give the iron a go at the 380c ish mark and I think you will be happy.
The iron also has a power down feature if it’s left alone for 90 minutes. To reset, cycle the power.

I will order some spare tips at some point too.

Courty and the @electrotechs

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4 Likes
#2

Worth trying to hack it to restrict max temp?

#3

No, don’t want to break it. It really doesn’t need to be high to work well so we’ll see how it goes.

That said, If it gets abused i’ll just lock it up…

Courty

#4

Best of luck

#5

The issue with the Hakko irons only developed after a couple years of abuse by people leaving them on and cranking the temperature up high to deal with their lack of thermal capacity for soldering large metal things that sink the heat away.

At work we use these to prevent this issue:

Another thing to remember with this type of tip is they typically require the iron to be recalibrated when the changed with a thermometer if it’s a different shape of tip. As to the issue of people cranking it up, most professional irons, including the Hakko have a password protection option in their menus.

The new Weller looks great but very much suspect the same issue will happen with this as the Hakko irons were great when they were new, and this Weller suffers from the same ‘legacy’ design where the replaceable tip has no temperature sensor incorporated into it, so the temperature sensor is some distance away from the tip causing people to need to crank the temperature up way above the solder’s melting point to increase the thermal capacity, as there is a delay before the sensor detects this because of it’s distance, which causes the solder not to melt because the tip is below it’s melting point even though the sensor thinks it’s much higher.

The ideal solution would be to look at irons with a tip that includes the temperature sensor in the tip as they have a better response to temperature drop when soldering, and don’t have to be cranked so high, or to look at buying a RF soldering iron which uses tips made of special alloy combinations to control the temperature through the curie point fo the metal, these irons are obviously more expensive but by their design shouldn’t need to be abused as much.

Given the iron is here obviously you should see how it goes but if the issue happens again in future it would be worth considering a different type of iron, OKI do a really good range of RF irons, and there are a number of irons from Weller, Hakko and others that have a tip with the temperature sensor integrated (obviously more expensive to replace) but more responsive. We have a couple Hakko FX888-D units at work and replaced one with a FX-951 with the sensor in the tip and it’s wayyyyyy better.