Soldering station thoughts and guidelines

[Dannyx]

Originally Posted by stj

well do they use the same hakko base unit?

Yes, I think they do. At least I can see Rossmann swapping them around on the Hakko station he has - the only one.

[Dannyx]

Just found this. It's nice to know my KSGER iron is on the same page as that thing and it takes the same tips Louis uses

[Dannyx]

Also found something interesting here - the knife tip Louis uses in his Micropencil appears to have a knock-off T12 r after all. I just couldn't pass it up and ordered one Neat !

I just realised I kept referring to those tiny tips as "Micropencils", but that's actually a brand name for the handpiece, not a specific tip. The tip can be anything. I always thought it referred to the knife tip...anyway...

[Dannyx]

Originally Posted by stj

are you "diode gone wild" on utube??

i say that because he, and now you - are the only people i know who use a soldering gun on electronics!
(your in the same country too. - did i blow your cover?)

Only now did I decide to check that guy out, as he's apparently pretty popular and does very interesting stuff, right up there with ElectroBoom and BigCliveDotCom and I don't think he's from the same country as me TBH, so I remembered this post of yours and decided to reply after all this time

[stj]

he is the best on utube at explaining psu's!!

[eccerr0r]

What's wrong with using a soldering gun?

[stj]

where do you put the bullets?

[eccerr0r]

Through the board after it destroys tracks on the PCB

[Dannyx]

Originally Posted by eccerr0r

What's wrong with using a soldering gun?

I use mine all the time - it's there on my workbench always plugged in and ready to go. It heats up in seconds and the heat is concentrated on the very tip, the business end, instead of it being radiated by an element like in SMD stations.

I heard that in some situations it has the potential to kill stuff, since the tip is electrified, which makes me a bit nervous to use it on stuff more delicate stuff like ICs.

[stj]

it's not the voltage, it's induction because the "tip" is an electromagnet.

[Dannyx]

Originally Posted by stj

it's not the voltage, it's induction because the "tip" is an electromagnet.

So when you let go of the trigger, the back EMF of the "coil" is the killer ?

[redwire]

Originally Posted by Dannyx

So when you let go of the trigger, the back EMF of the "coil" is the killer ?

Yes. The soldering gun is not grounded and the arc when you switch-off the trigger makes several kV at the tip. I think a cap across the switches helps. This is the old Weller 8200's.

In the repair shop, we got bored and used to have to competitions.
We would all use soldering guns for a day. It could be fun desoldering IC's but would show who the best tech was.

But I found the tip would make a spike when you click off and destroy an IC.
You can connect neon lamp to the tip and ground the other side and see it flash.

[Dannyx]

Would one of those yellow X caps across the switch be a good idea ?

What I do is hold down the trigger to get the tip nice and hot then release it away from the part and use the remaining heat to do the actual solder job. Of course it doesn't always work and it gets tougher and tougher the bigger the joint is...

[redwire]

It's the solenoid-style transformer they use in soldering guns, it has a lot of leakage inductance. I think capacitors would certainly help. You can hear the arc on the switch.
But there is still 50/60Hz mains leakage currents to the tip, due to the transformer's winding capacitance and no ground. It still is risky.

I don't use soldering guns on delicate IC's after I killed a few. If I really need that heat, I add a ground clip and then do the work.

[Dannyx]

Originally Posted by redwire

It's the solenoid-style transformer they use in soldering guns

This one has an E-I transformer - clearly has laminates.

A cap across the switch certainly can't hurt and might as well throw it in there.

As for grounding: I assume you ground the secondary (one of the fat output bars going to the tip), since the primary is straight on 230v so that would be a short....

[redwire]

I've only seen the solenoid-style transformers, they date back to the 1940's in USA. It's a spool of sheet iron for the core.
What do they have in Europe?

Here a guy adds capacitors to stop the switches from arcing and burning, but he did it wrong putting them sorta across the primary, and one looks low voltage.

[sam_sam_sam]

Yeah I had one of these way back when before temperature controlled soldering iron became popular

What I did not like about them is that the heating element did not last very long or the heating element connection were not very good you had continuously clean them what a pain in the a** this was

[Dannyx]

No, it's nothing like that. THIS is what these "Radioprogres" guns we have around here look like on the inside, save for small differences in the switch mechanism. The pic I linked to actually shows the original switch which is nothing more than two pieces of metal touching together when the trigger was squeezed, so a substantial arc would occur every time you let go. When I finally opened mine up, the inside of the case was dark and smoked in that area from all those sparks, so that was the first thing to go. Just about everybody who used one of these replaced those metal plates with a microswitch, which is actually not that easy and requires some extensive mods to the case - NOT fun...

There also exist a sort-of knock-off version of the original "RP" gun which was made in Poland (I think) which had a slightly different outer case to fit a slightly smaller transformer and STILL had the two plates for the switch. The two models are not compatible, so a direct case swap is impossible. The original RP transformer in the picture is too big to fit in the polish gun case - I own both models and faced this problem. I thought I could just shove the RP unit into a polish case but it wouldn't close properly (transformer is too fat). Ironically the case of the polish model gave in first (became very brittle and started to crack at the screws), despite being a more recent acquirement, but I simply could not find cases for it after that, so I had to modify a RP one which also meant doing the switch hack, since they do not come with switches or ANY hardware - not even the screws ! !

Although they both work (one at work, one at home), I was thinking of graduating to something similar from this century but the prices are pretty high, so I scrapped the idea for now.

[mariushm]

other than fast heating and cheap tips (as you can use any copper wire as tip) i don't see really any pluses for a solder gun ... and even those are debatable.

There's minimal heat reservoir... there's big solder tips out there because they can store energy... so you can keep a tip on something for a long time with minimal cooldown and the soldering station counteracts by pulsing more power. The soldering gun heats fast but you soon have to stop pressing the trigger or you'll burn out the transformer.

You can't easily do drag soldering,
it's difficult soldering surface mount leds as you can damage them due to uncontrolled (too high) heat,
you burn out the flux inside solder wire too fast due to tip heat so you have to use extra flux for proper soldering
you can't use a chisel tip or use a conic tip on its side to apply heat to both leads of a part simultaneously
you can't use a wide tip to heat up a wire to tin it... you have the heat and power for a few seconds to heat the wire and tin but it's more "brute force technique"

I don't understand why you wouldn't just spend 30-50$ on a hakko 936 clone for your own comfort... think of it as an investment in your own mental health... and something like 5$ a month investment over 1-2 years... if and when you quit that job you can always take it with you.

[momaka]

Originally Posted by mariushm

other than fast heating and cheap tips (as you can use any copper wire as tip) i don't see really any pluses for a solder gun ... and even those are debatable.
...

I agree.

I have a 60W soldering gun and I've never found a good use for it, especially now that I have a T12 station. But even before I got my T12 station, the thing was just never any good. I remember struggling to desolder the output wires from the PCB of a laptop adapter that used a little tougher-than-normal LF solder. As a comparison, my 35W soldering iron wasn't much better on that... but not any worse either. I finally was able to tackle that project back then when I got a heat gun and used that to pre-heat the entire adapter. Still, that's something I wound never try to do again with those tools. With my T12, it takes me less than 10 seconds to do everything.

I still use the 35W iron quite a bit, simply because it has a Copper tip, which over the years, has worn out and became spoon-shaped with fairly sharp corners. This makes SMD work a breeze - especially those tiny sand-grain-like capacitors. Just did a tiny resistor array on a RAM stick the other day. It was a bit challenging, but turned out quicker and easier than using my hot air.

Originally Posted by mariushm

I don't understand why you wouldn't just spend 30-50$ on a hakko 936 clone for your own comfort... think of it as an investment in your own mental health... and something like 5$ a month investment over 1-2 years... if and when you quit that job you can always take it with you.

Exactly!
Though I wouldn't exactly go with a 936 clone or any 900M-based iron for that matter - those 900M clone tips are just as poor as using an unregulated wall iron, IMO.

Again, I've probably wrote this somewhere in the beginning of this thread, but T12 is where I'd put my money - and preferably a station that can do at least 60W.

This is what I use, actually:
https://www.circuitspecialists.com/l...l-display.html
It's probably more pricey than some of the other T12 stations out there, but frankly, I think it was worth it. I've owned this station since 2012. It's not high quality, but it gets the job done. Has a simple line traffo inside, so no SMPS to go bad. Just needed some of the cheap factory wiring re-worked.

As for tips... I have a 5.2 mm bevel type on the above station. It's pretty much my "workhorse" tip for anything - even most SMD stuff. Don't think that just because you need to solder/desolder small SMD stuff you need a small tip. It's actually easier tackling SMD things with a bigger tip, because I flood most/all the SMD component's pins with flux+solder, and then just heat it up. Takes seconds to remove most components - way faster than hot air. Only when I'm doing the SOIC and TSOP stuff, I end up either switching to a sharper/smaller tip or my 35W wall iron.

Speaking of the 5.2 mm bevel tip, this is it:
https://www.circuitspecialists.com/lf-52d.html

And on very rare occasions, I have a 45W Radio Shack bulb desoldering iron. It's basically a 45W wall iron with a special tip that's connected to a big rubber bulb "sucker". Overall, I use it mostly for removing ICs and large multi-pin components on older stuff. Best suited for single-sided PCBs, but with patience (and maybe some pre-heating, if needed), it will also work for multi-layer PCBs. Last I used it was to remove a broken PCI connector on a motherboard I found in a trash-picked PC (it was that Gateway Select 650). Took a while to do all of those pin on the PCI connector, but overall turned to be the less destructive and more reliable method for removing that broken PCI connector. I tried removing the PCI connector on another motherboard using hot air, and I just couldn't get the whole area under the connector hot enough to desolder it.

So for a very few special purposes, that bulb desoldering iron does come in handy. But again, for the majority of the work (like over 80-90%), I use my T12 station with the D52 tip.