Buying Your First Soldering Station (UPDATE READ DESCRIPTION)

today soldering has reached the level of a fine art and it's become a vital one in many fields whether you're a hobbyist weekend tinkerer or professional buying your first soldiering station can be a confusing and often overwhelming task now up until just a few years ago if you wanted to acquire a soldering station that was of decent quality you had to accept the fact that you were going to be spending some cash but these days there's a lot more hardware that's conducive to almost anyone's budget and to anyone's skill level now today I'm going to talk about what I personally consider to be an excellent first soldering station that's great both for the hobbyist and that weekend Pro without breaking the bank now the most common request I receive from you guys is to recommend a soldering station that's both affordable and a good performer now my answer to that question has always been the secondary market go on eBay and find it used FX 951 like this one for a couple hundred bucks or if you're wanting an even better value get on eBay and you can find an FP 102 station like this for 150 bucks or less but buying used isn't always the best idea you never really know what you're getting so for the past two months I've made it my personal mission to seek out and evaluate a new soldering station that met my personal standards in both quality and performance and wasn't predicated on thirty-year-old technology but most importantly comes in at a price point of less than $75 I think I've done that so let's take a look now before we begin reviewing the actual soldering performance we're going to be looking at some safety stuff and we're going to start in the back here but the AC mains input I want to break open the top and I want to take a look at some stuff on the power board let's take a look okay let's just very carefully pull this top off and we have a great great view here of the inside so we're looking at the power board and pretty much the logic of the soldiering station is right here but let's start with the power because this is the most interesting part in my opinion now we're looking at the AC mains input side and this is where the quality really started to take off between this unit and the other units that I looked at if you take a look here our line neutral and ground AC lines these are hard soldered into the main board and on all the other units that I looked at the input side of the AC was either very poorly cramped or yeah it was just poorly crimped onto the main board and I did not like that this is a nice permanent connection and it looks really good but up from that we have we have an inductor here which is just a little common mode choke we have a power filter cab we've got another inline fuse and then we have these nice beefy heat sinks on both sides this is a what is that part that is a and it's a 2200 seat okay that's a that's a power rectifier and it has this nice gate sink so this is going to dissipate heat really nicely we have a few diodes here in our main power transformer and on the other side I think we have a little FET here but I've got to tell you guys just because it's from China does not mean that the quality is always bad this is a fantastic little design and it's very well done the power board here I give a solid 8 out of 10 it was just very well done and the other units that look identical to this on the outside whoo-hoo I can't recommend those but but this is excellent so let's move on and look at some other parts okay so we've looked at the power board let's see if we can look at the brains of this thing and see this is the only thing connecting this to the power board so I want to take that off move this to the side and this is just this is the front face of the soldering station and again fairly well designed we have a little beeper here I think this is a CR maybe it's 16 32 this is just for the RTC or there or the real-time clock this just keeps the time and here we have it's an STM 32 microcontroller that's a pretty powerful little pic micro that controls the it's the brains of the operation and you know the small attention to detail here look hell all of the soldered connections here to the den Ende put there nice and heat-shrink I mean it's just really well done I mean on other units it's just sloppily soldered in together they really really kind of you know went above and beyond I have no problems recommending this from a design perspective it's just fantastic and for $49 I mean my god I mean it's it's it's truly remarkable so you know design wise everything looks pretty solid here and the quality is just pretty excellent so let's kind of see this bad boy in action now Before we jump into that action there's one thing I forgot to mention now obviously we're looking at the back again where the AC power comes in but look at this in the back we have some protection with this inline fuse off of the AC input how nice is that excellent but while we're back here let's see if our soul during tip is referencing earth ground I want to get my multimeter I want to set it to continuity I don't want to see if we can buzz and have continuity between the earth reference and the soldiering tip so let me just get my probes here situated there's the earth and let's just come here to the tip see if we get a buzz excellent ESD friendly it just keeps getting better and better alrighty let's test you out now as the front faceplate suggests this is a t12 soulring station well what does that mean that means that this Seoul during station takes real jaco t12 and t15 tips now the great thing about a t12 or t15 tip station is that the tips are directly driven by the station which means you have excellent thermal output capacity and your startup or heat up time is virtually non-existent by the time you turn the station on within probe six to seven seconds you're up to full operating temperatures so there is no waiting let's turn this on and let's give it a little a little test here and I think I have this set to maybe 285 degrees so let's see yep I have it set to 280 degrees Celsius we're already up to 260 to 270 and we are up to temperature that fast it's pretty remarkable now a few things here on the readout obviously this top left number is what our temperature is set to the middle number is our current temperature and this this will come down in just a few seconds to 280 degrees the bottom-left number is our current voltage output the 25 degrees Celsius this little number here is basically just the room temperature this is military time it's 732 here now and this top number up here is kind of cool it's it's how much power is outputting from the iron itself so as you can see here it's idling pretty good at around I'd say on average 8% power or 8% load if we were to take our iron and we were to touch it or make contact with something with a lot of thermal mass like a big thick round plane that's going to soak a bunch of heat away you would see this number go up because it's gonna have to deliver more power to maintain this two hundred eighty degrees Celsius temperature now we're gonna go over just a few quick things if you want to change the set temperature you have a rotary encoder here and this is where all of the adjustments are made so you're just going to give it one quick press and this is where you set the temperature now normally I like to work with anything between two hundred eighty-five and maybe 315 degrees and it's currently set to move in five degree increments so I want to set this to let's say 315 and I'm gonna press the rotary encoder once more and just like that it jumps right up there and we're at 318 319 after a few seconds this will come back down to where it should be around 315 degrees Celsius so you know that's how to quickly change the temperature but you have so many freaking options with this this station that stm32 is really doing the law here to control this iron so if we do a long hold on the rotary encoder whoops whoops damn it I hit the boost if I do a long press on the rotary encoder we get menu options now the first two are standby and sleep and they're sort of the same but they're really not standby is just if the iron is not being used and it can detect if the handpiece is being used or not we can set this so that after 10 minutes of no use the iron is going to cool down to 50 degrees Celsius and in order for the iron to come back online we can shake it so when you basically pull the handpiece out of this out of the handpiece holder the iron will know that where the station will know that and it will uh it will come back online or we can set this to switch which basically means after 10 minutes the iron goes into its standby mode if we want to get the iron back up to operating temperature we just press the rotary encoder button like that and it comes back online but I want to set this to shake because it's so convenient now to get out of this we'll just do it long hold and there are several options here that you can go through you know you can turn on you can turn on specific tips and you can turn off specific tips that's pretty neat you can stepping you can change the increment of you know in how many degrees you can dial in the temperature I have this set of 5 and you know you have a screen saver which I have this on you know it comes on within 5 minutes and you just have so much stuff here you can turn the the buzzer on or off I like to keep that on you can show the date and time the real-time clock that's where you adjust the time all sorts of stuff here so you know you can really spend a good 20 or 30 minutes going through all of the options and dialing this system in to your specifications into the way you want it to operate and that's why I love this station what's one of the many reasons you literally have control so you want to back out of here and we're back to the main station those are just a little bit of the controls let's see how well this thing solders now here we have an NES mainboard and I think this makes for a pretty damn good benchmark for what we're wanting to look at we had a lot of nice thick Graham floods here that are going to soak thermal energy away so we can really determine how well our iron is performing when it really needs to use energy and we can also do a lot of reflow in here to see how well and how thoroughly we can wet and reflow these joints with some nice fresh solder to see see how well that's working there - so we'll start with that will reflow a few of these dip packages here and then we'll check out Thea the grounding here so let's zoom in and let's do that but you know before we do that I have to tell you the handpiece that ships with this particular iron is phenomenal I love it it feels like it's an extension of to my body I feel like I have complete and total control and then I'm not I'm not guessing distance where things are it's just so close and you know I have you know I have nothing but Jaco equipment here this is an you know a 2028 handpiece and I honest-to-god have to tell you guys I really prefer this handpiece over this handpiece it's not that it's 20 times better or a thousand times better it just feels better and it performs just as well it's all a matter of what feels good in your hands that's what she said but also with the tips because you know they're they're t15 and t12 you just take your tip pad here pull your old tip bat and if you out and if you need to change your tip grab your new tip put it in just like that it's really that simple and so I just you know wanted to talk about this because I did not want to leave this behind the handpiece is outstanding I mean it's kind of generic but it's it's it's just so good at any rate let's zoom in in here and let's reflow some joints and let's just see how well this thing performs okay I have my knife edge tip here and real quick this is a generic Kester k-series knife-edge tip this is not a Jaco tip and let me tell you guys something I have all of their tips and these these generic fake clone tips they work pretty damn well for what they are it's especially for the price so having said that let's just let's just try to reflow here and see if we can wet some of these joints now I am set to 288 degrees I'm shy 285 degrees and let's see how good of a job it's doing so yeah we're coming right in here and we're definitely able to reflow that at two hundred and eighty-five degrees that's pretty good let's try the one underneath here and all of this is this this is just one big huge ground flood so it's going to soak away all of that heat and all of that energy let's see how well our little knife tip does and that's that's clearly gone molten and we're getting some good wetting action there that works fantastic now let's turn this around and let's try to reflow some dip pins okay right here we're looking at part of the expansion connector and I'm just gonna clean my tip off here a bit I want to bring some solder in and I'm gonna just reflow these just as an exercise so when it introduced some solder here and we're just going to go down the line no flux or just want to see how well the iron performs and how how good of a job it's doing and putting that energy into these into these plated through holes and and and just how much energy we're getting in there and I don't see anything going cold I think it's really doing a really really good job just like that come to the end let me clean my tip off here and I can get rid of that bridge like so just like that phenomenal performance let's move to something surface mount now we have our D 16 tip our generic d 16 tip and I have our tweezers and a resistor here to replace the one that's missing and we flux this up so I'm just gonna want to advance this go five package into its landing gear like so I'm gonna apply just a little bit of flux here in a little bit a little bit of fun just like that there's one side I'm gonna rotate the board around like so no yeah actually I'm Larry I'm gonna rotate it don't want to come in here on this side like so just like that I'm telling you I mean for precision work - I mean - no problems whatsoever that's a little dodgy because yeah I can't see too well I've got too many damn things in my way but it works and it works great and we're still set to two hundred eighty-five degrees let's have a little fun here let's say that yeah the 73 74 drivers not uh not working as it should and maybe there's a connection issue so let's say we're going to reflow that thing I'm just want to advance that same detail at 12:00 tip in here and we're just going to sort of work these pins in like so do a nice little quick reflow like so just like that let's see we're gonna set some jumpers here for whatever reason I want to short that jumper I want to short that jumper fantastic let's say we're going to preet in these pads we're going to get our our ribbon cable in here so want to make our connections I just want to go down the line here like so perfect you couldn't ask for that to work any better well guys that pretty much concludes this video I want to thank everybody who's really been patient with me I have been wanting to do this video for about a year now and you guys have kept and kept asking me about it I'm so glad that I had a couple of months here to really block out so I could do a real thorough test on this iron and put it through the paces never in a million years would I recommend something that I didn't thoroughly test myself and with banggood.com I actually have a good little deal going the links down below are affiliate links but I have worked closely with them to ensure that the links that you click below or get you exactly the same equipment that I am using remember there are a dozen permutations of this gesture t12 soldiering station and it even goes by other names too but the other ones that I looked at there's just a lot of things I did not like so if you want to get this unit aspect this way check out the links below that includes the soul ring holder the the handpiece holder all of those tips and the station itself with that with that handpiece and I'm telling you guys for the past month I really don't even used my jaco stations this thing just does that good of a job it's that reliable thus far and the performance is just there so having said that I hope you enjoyed this I'll see you guys next time take care for now

Channel: Voultar

Views: 213,568

Keywords: soldering, soldering iron, soldering station, hakko t12 t15

Id: cGdHJ3BTh_c

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 25 2018