Discussion regarding professional soldering station JBC vs Ersa vs Weller

[MuonNeutrino]

Dear EEV Bloggers,

I had a doubt about reaching conclusion which soldering station should I acquire. Furthermore, I need your sincere advice fulfilled by your experience in order to reach final decision.


Here is list of the important points that are personally important to me:

1. Price is not an issue, nor the deciding factor
2. High Quality and Long life expectancy is the imperative for the soldering station
3. Soldering tip should not have issues with thermal loss during prolonged session of soldering
4. Actual station should be intelligent
5. Ergonomics of the iron itself

Since there are very good market for the soldering stations present, I will lower my choices to these stations:

ERSA I-Con 1V
Weller WT1010
Weller WX
JBC Premium line either precision or Heavy duty

The application for which I will be using the soldering station will be in the both smd and regular electronics prototyping, so future tool upgrading is the option to consider. As I already know that each of these brands offer the proprietary smd tweezers and similar options, this choice variety makes me even harder to reach conclusion.

Thank you very much.

PS: If I missed the proper thread, or place for this type of question please excuse me, since Im new to the blog.

[capt bullshot]

Ersa - first brand name in Germay, but has been a bit disappointing to me, wouldn't buy Ersa again. Mainly because of various failures of the soldering irons
Weller - just works as expected
JBC - best I've ever seen, if cost isn't a concern, I'd buy nothing else

[digsys]

There's a few extensive threads on the exact same subject. Have you checked them out first? A lot of input.

[MuonNeutrino]

I have read many of the forum pages, but nobody, since now, is actually comparing the top of the line brands and their top of the line products.

So I have rather sweet dilema and problem. I have situation where money does not dictate the product, but I can not decide which product should I buy.

Thanks for understanding.

[stj]

if money is no object,
i would buy this:


http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Universal-soldering-controller-for-Hakko-JBC-and-etc-soldering-UniSolder-5-2-/222478565688

it's a fully built clone of this:
http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=7218

i'm going to order some pcb's soon and make a couple myself.


you still need to buy the iron(s) btw - but with this, you can just swap between the ones you listed!!