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Radio Shack does product design?

I have a couple of these 60W soldering stations I got for $40 each when my local Radio Shack brick and mortar went out of business a few years back.

I had assumed they were re-badged Atten stations like the previous model, the 64-053, or the similar unit from Harbor Freight. The display is the same as the Atten AT938D.

It uses two-wire sensing. But when I went to change out a heater, nope, it's not that.

Then I thought maybe it's a Hakko-knockoff station as it seems to be using true 4-wire sensing unlike the Attens. Nope, not that either, heater resistance is wrong it uses the low-resistance A1322 heater.

Maybe Weller knock-off it looks superficially like the WE1010. Nope, not that either.

So I did what I should have done first and look thru the paperwork and it says "Custom Manufactured for Radio Shack in Taiwan." Open it up and it's true, this isn't a cheap Shenzen job with LM324s and a PIC it's got a bunch of relatively swish parts like TI OPO7C precision op amps and an ATMega88. It's using the Atten display but they've bolted what looks to be an entirely novel controller board onto it and pretty well-engineered one at that as compared to mainland-China ones at around this price.

Well, whaddya know.

Reply to
bitrex
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Rather, it doesn't put the heater in series with the thermistor to make a 2-wire interface, which is a crappy cost-cutting move.

Reply to
bitrex

I picked up an aldi soldering station on impulse reduced to $9 on clear out a year or so ago. How bad can it be I thought, it claimed to do 200-400C i n 10C steps. Well, it's hopeless, my wooden Solons are more useful. Set to

400 it struggles to get hot enough, and the nonstandard fitting tips oxidis e excessively fast.

Wish I'd picked up more of the 2.99 multimeters. Those go for 20 or so else where. Piles of cheap things have their uses.

NT

Reply to
Tabby

Well the angle I was taking was that in this case I am pleasantly surprised! I thought it was going to be a cheap China knock-off. And it is Chinese made but the other China, not China, China.

At $40 it was a good buy, because it's not a poorly-made soldering station at all and does the business very well, been using one as my main iron for about a year now. $99 seems a fair price for it. Not the absurd Rat Shack markup of a knock-off I was expecting at this point in the company's history... 8-)

Reply to
bitrex

And the heating elements are readily available, just have to make sure to get the one with the low resistance thermocouple and not the 55 ohm one.

Reply to
bitrex

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