Fantastic New Soldering Iron

I bought an iron like this without the display. The trouble with it was th e control being in the handle means it gets bumped constantly in use. They need to either recess the dial more into the handle or I would be fine wit h making it a completely recessed control adjusted with a screwdriver.

Nice that they include extra tips, but that stand is a loser. It's about t he size of a match box and will move all over the work bench.

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Nice bench vise. I'll get one of those.

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John Larkin      Highland Technology, Inc 

The best designs are necessarily accidental.

Looks just like a copy of a Weller Soldering Iron!

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On a sunny day (Mon, 7 Dec 2020 08:34:21 +0000) it happened TTman wrote in :

I noticed Amazon is selling ebay and aliexpress stuff on occasion, with a margin, Maybe the same iron, but for 230V and display in Celcius:

US $18.77 free shipping first hit in google for "ebay Soldering-Display-Adjustable-Temperature tweezers" even the descrption is the same word for word.

cdn$ is roughlt US$ x 0.75 at present . . . .

An extra $2 gets you desoldering pump, cutters and a deeloox presentation zippered carrying case.

The tips are rubbish. I don't see a means of ordering replacement tips, by the dozen.

BTW - display is set temp, not tip temp.

This is the sort of thing that really needs a UL or CSA sticker.

RL

On a sunny day (Mon, 07 Dec 2020 09:17:10 -0500) it happened legg wrote in :

That is a webcam?

Yes, there is a lot of not so good stuff on the market, Have used this soldering station for years:

was more expensive though. Voltcraft stuff seems to work.

For the melting, nice toy:

heating a baco, 12 amps: or fry eggs with it...

That link goes to a webcam. The link I posted is

Where's the link? The american versions are not the same. They only adjust in 50 degree increments. The maximum temperature is lower.

A desoldering pump often destroys the pads, especially on SMD. You can use solder wick or a stainless steel probe to open a through hole.

Cutters are extremely cheap on amazon. They may not last long depending on the service. They are not needed for SMD.

Replacement tips are available on Amazon for all kinds of soldering irons.

I don't see how. The heater is capable of dumping 80 w. Without feedback, the tip would go over the desired temperature.

Why? For CDN$21.99, who cares.

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Science teaches us to trust. - sw

Appologies. Can't seem to get tinyurl website to copy

RL

That iron runs directly off of the AC power line without an isolating transformer. That normally requires double insulation, a thermal fuse, and an overcurrent fuse, none of which I see present. Get the iron wet, or have the heating element spray NiCr on the insulation, and you have some AC leakage to the tip. Solder something that's voltage sensitive, and it goes poof.

I run my soldering irons and other devices from GFCI protected outlet boxes and adapters: because I don't like blowing up the equipment I'm trying to repair. It's probably overkill and not really necessay. However, it does get my attention when I plug in a repair job and it trips the GCFI breaker, which usually means I forgot to unplug the repair job before soldering. The UL sticker doesn't guarantee that you can't find a way to kill yourself or burn the labe down, but it does protect against most of the common failures and mistakes.

Please note that UL doesn't care if the device works as advertised. It only cares that it will not electrocute the user or set fire to the lab.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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That has no tip temperature readout. Here is a quote from a Soldering Station with HANMATEK Digital Display:

FAST HEATING BUT STABLE TEMPERATURE? After one year of research and development and testing, our R & D team combined with the latest smart transformer, ceramic craft iron core, advanced PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) technology, this soldering station can get perfect 6 seconds fast heating and constant temperature. The problem of overheating and the actual temperature is different from the preset temperature has become history.

Here is a quote from a soldering iron similar the the one I posted:

Temp Adjustable & Heat UP Quickly, 194-896F adjustable, heat up quickly and accurate temperature control with PID micro-computer temperature control technology.

So you *CAN* put a PID controller in a simple inexpensive soldering iron and measure the tip temperature.

You have to punch it twice fast to put the url in the clipboard.

Thanks for using TinyRL. This eliminates the problem of wrap in long URLs.

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Science teaches us to trust. - sw

You do not normally take a soldering iron into a bathtub. How else are you going to get it wet.

I have never seen NiCr spray anything. The insulation is inside the iron tip. How is NiCr going to get there. The tip is grounded, so there is no leakage path to the tip.

An ungrounded tip can cause ESD. ESD and leakage are solved by grounding the tip to line ground (not line neutral) and grounding the circuit under test. Remember to turn power off before working on the circuit.

GCFI only cares about unbalance between line hot and line neutral. If you are soldering to line hot with a grounded soldering iron tip, you would get a lot of sparks and damage the circuit. The 25 ms GCFI delay is a long time for semiconductors.

The soldering iron tip is grounded to line ground. It is easy to check the continuity with a multimeter or DVM.

If the PID controller fails, the iron will get very hot and you will see that it has failed.

Both failures are easy to check by the user. UL doesn't catch failures that occur in normal use after the UL testing.

--
Science teaches us to trust. - sw

In my experience, you don't see beautiful girls in EE

Not like this anyway :-)

Comments on website included a single star - user blamed flakey stand on his burning through the line cord. Couldn't have got ALL the way through . . . . .

RL

Ahhh the old "Asbestos fingers" routine :-)

I've known two. One works for me now. She's also a flamenco dancer, and when she gets something to work she gets happy and starts tapping her feet on the floor. Sounds like a machine gun just down the hall from my office.

Most people in those photos don't look like they actually know how to solder.

There is

How is Mikey going to get your equipment wet, when he's not even supposed to go near it? (. . .Is your name Mikey?)

Crimped, nicked, kinked or substandard heater wire will arc spectacularly as it fails on a point of erosion or fracture, so someday you may see NiCr heater wire failure.

That black stuff you see on the nearby insulation, afterwards? That's gaseous metalization and carbon - but there's probably a little ball of molten heater material rolling around somwhere, if not imbedded deep in nearby insulation walls.

ESD build-up is avoided using controlled impedances (~megohms). Shorts are pretty uncontrolled.

Someday, you're going to forget that the power is not turned off. Or even better, you'll learn that the Chinese O/I switch doesn't actually disconect the correct (or even any) power line wire. The clock is ticking.

GFCIs will trip at much higher-impedance faults than that. The idea is that this should avoid the zorro-like blind spots that I have burned on my retinas, obtained on a workbench with multiple safety isolation features, on an 'off' day.

. . . until it isn't.

. . . . in a dark room, maybe.

UL /CSA perform single fault abnormals that might occur, where unlisted materials, or mis-used listed materials form an intended safety barrier. So; wire, switches, regulators, plastics, barrier insulation . . . . It's often easier to used listed materials within their ratings, if approval is intended.

New products can include:

plastics that deform or fail at too low a temperature, wire insulation ditto, glass-filled barrier matl ditto. line cords/connectors ditto, electrical connections ditto

"Tell Me Why I Can't Do that."

It isn't 'can'; it's 'based on x decades of numbing stupidity . . .'.

There is some small reassurance that products from the Chinese mainland have already been mfrd and sold in gazillion quantities and have garnered field testing experience in that process - but then you could just be one of those gazillion test subjects.

Cost of UL approval, amortized over a large volume of successfully marketed product, would be miniscule. If it don't got the mark, chances are you are participating in a much smaller group of test subjects.

Anyways, happy soldering.

RL