soldering iron

86 Articles

Homebrew Not A Hakko

April 28, 2018 by 9 Comments

We don’t know if [Marius Taciuc] was thinking about how all Jedi make their own lightsabers as a rite of passage, but he decided that it was time to build his own soldering iron. He used a Hakko T12 tip which has a built-in thermocouple. However, he found that the information on the Internet about the tips was either incomplete or incorrect. Naturally, he figured it out and you can see the completed iron in the video, below.

The problem stems from the thermocouple type. Some sites he found identified it as a type K device. Others said it wasn’t, but didn’t say what kind it was. He took a container of oil and heated it to various temperatures and then measured it with both a commercial soldering iron and the T12 tip. By plotting the data against known thermocouple curves, he concluded the device was actually type C.

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Reviewing The HBTool HB-019 Desoldering Iron: It Probably Won’t Shock You

April 10, 2018 by 38 Comments

This unholy lovechild of a cheap solder sucker and an even cheaper soldering iron is the HBTool HB-019 desoldering iron. It came to me for the princely sum of five pounds ($7). So for somewhere between the cost of a pint of foaming ale and the pub’s pie and mash I’d eat alongside it, what had I got?

Regular Hackaday readers will be familiar with my penchant for ordering cheap tools and other electronic gizmos from the usual suppliers of Far Eastern tech, and subjecting them to review for your entertainment and edification. Sometimes the products are so laughably bad as to be next-to-worthless, other times they show enough promise to be of use, and just occasionally they turn out to be a genuine diamond in the rough, a real discovery. This is no precious stone, but it still makes for an entertaining review. Continue reading “Reviewing The HBTool HB-019 Desoldering Iron: It Probably Won’t Shock You” →

Retrofit Temperature Control To A Soldering Station

April 7, 2018 by 1 Comment

We’ve probably all seen USB soldering irons advertised for very little money, and concluded that they might not necessarily be the most useful of tools. The cheapest of these lack any real temperature regulation. Enter [Paulo Bruckmann], who has attached a thermistor to his iron with Kapton tape, added an Arduino Uno clone with rotary encoder and Nokia LCD, and put the result in a 3D printed case for a tiny and low powered temperature controlled soldering station. The claimed cost is only $10, which seems credible given the low price of Arduino clones.

The software provides the expected PID control, with the advantage of very quick warm-up due to the tip’s tiny size. The power source is 9 V rather than a USB 5 V, so the combination gives an iron capable of working on much larger joints than when unmodified. He therefore seems to have created what appears to be a significantly more capable iron from this unpromising start, something we find quite impressive. Take a look at his video below the break.

We reviewed one of these little irons last year, and found it to be a toy, but not a joke. Meanwhile we’ve seen some other mods for them, including a pair of desoldering tweezers.

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Review: CXG E90W Temperature-Controlled Soldering Iron

February 9, 2018 by 50 Comments

It’s an entertaining pastime when browsing the array of wonders available from the other side of the world at the click of the mouse, to scour the listings of the unusual, the interesting, or the inexpensive. Sometimes when you find something unexpected you are rewarded with a diamond in the rough, while at other moments your bargain basement purchase is revealed as a hilariously useless paperweight. This is a game in which the stake is relatively low and the reward can be significant, so rarely does an order for some parts or sundries go by without a speculative purchase.

The latest to arrive is a soldering iron. The CXG E90W is a 90W mains-powered temperature controlled iron with its control electronics built into its handle. Such irons are by no means unusual, what makes this one different is that it has a low price tag.

The Miniware TS100, an iron I quite like and the current darling of the pack, is priced at nearly £50 ($71). Just how can this iron priced at just under £15 ($21) be any good? I placed one on the order, and waited for delivery.

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Protect Your TS100 Soldering Iron

November 26, 2017 by 14 Comments

The TS100 is a compact temperature-controlled soldering iron that’s long on features without too eye-watering a price. One thing it lacks as shipped though is anything to protect it from the thumps and bumps of everyday life in a toolbox, save for its elegant cardboard-and-foam retail box which requires iron and element/bit to be separated.

[Jeremy S. Cook] has a TS100, and decided to do something about it with a bit of work that may be quite simple but should be something that all TS100 owners take a look at. He made a very tough carrying container for it from a length of PVC pipe lined with the foam from the iron’s retail package. His short video which we’ve placed below the break takes us through the build, which bits of the packaging foam to cut, and uses a pair of PVC end caps to terminate the container. It’s not high-tech by any means, but enough of you will have TS100 irons to appreciate it.

You can read our review of the TS100 if you are interested, or you can marvel at the additions people have done to its software. Tetris, for example, or a working digital oscilloscope. Meanwhile [Jeremy] is an old friend of Hackaday, whose many projects include this recent unholy hybrid of fidget spinner and multirotor.

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Roll Your Own JBC Soldering Station

November 6, 2017 by 23 Comments

[Marco Reps] was soldering some boards with a lot of thermal mass and found his usual soldering iron was not up to the task. He noticed some professional JBC soldering stations that he liked, but he didn’t like the price. Even an entry-level JBC station is about $500 and they go up from there. He decided to build his own, but it did take awhile to complete. You can see two videos about the project, below.

How can you build your own soldering station and still claim it is a JBC? [Marco] noticed that the real performance of the iron came from the tip — what JBC calls a cartridge. In addition, the handle provides good ergonomics. You can buy the tips and handles from JBC for considerably less than a complete station. You just have to add the electronics to make it all work.

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Is It A MagLite Or A MagnaStat?

October 28, 2017 by 27 Comments

[David Schneider]’s love affair with Weller temperature controlled soldering irons began many years ago, but when he came to the point of needing a cordless iron he had problems finding one that replicated his trusty mains-powered soldering station. His solution was simple, to build his own, and in a stroke of genius he did so with an odd combination of a Weller MagnaStat element and bit, and a repurposed MagLite flashlight.

The Weller parts are all available off-the-shelf as spares, and the MagLite was easy to source. But its D cells would never give the required 24 V for the iron, so he had to incorporate a set of 14500 Li-ion cells with built-in electronic protection. The element protrudes from the front of the flashlight, giving an iron that seems to do the business but to our eyes looks rather unwieldy. Still, it does the job, and provides a far more sturdy and reliable iron than any cordless one we’ve yet seen, so we think that’s a result.

We’ve reviewed a Weller MagnaStat in the past,with a special look at availability of bits for older models.