I'm sorry for my tone, but when I make a comment that is helpful to the OP, and then spend 3 posts explaining to you why I wasn't dissing Ersa, only for eKretz to pop in to say "Ersa Awesome; you idiot," why would I feel immediate respect to this guy who wants to be my pops and call me kiddo? Defenders of Ersa unite? I never said anything bad about Ersa to begin with.
I'm sad to be part of the problem, here. I realize I am. And I may have talked halfway out of my ass about how hakko tips are made. I could definitely be wrong on that. I searched some patents and only found recent Hakko patents since 2004 and beyond. There are many that cover for instance sintered powder formation of the tip portion of the iron and and the silver soldering to the other components. But lots of other stuff, too. Not the smoking gun from my memory.
More non-professional REFERENCE points:
Since my only bastard file was decomissioned years ago due to being to fine and too dull, not cutting well at all, I used a coarse needle file. 900M tip chucked in a machine vice, and went at it with heavy strokes, full abandon mode, focused right at pointy tip of a fine conical (about 30 degree angle over the very tip). It took 14 strokes to expose the copper. This is removing essentially 1/3 the diameter of the tip to hit paydirt, and very obviously putting a deformation/bevel to get there. On the back of the tip that goes over the heater, I did 50 strokes on the side of this 1/4" cylinder without finding copper, making a nice big flat spot.
Then I just cut it apart coronal and longitudinal. The iron layer is ~8.5 mil thick all the way around. At the back, I was able to peel it off the copper partway to measure with high accuracy. At the tip, it looks about the same thickness, maybe a little thinner. My filing on the side of the back part was nearly all the way through, it turned out. The shell is hard. It is not very malleable. But it didn't crack or split. So I can't separate it all the way, yet, without perhaps cutting it into smaller slices.
If this was consistent, then on a thicker tip, say the face or side of a big hoof, you could do a really good amount of filing.
I feel dirty for having done this, but I get easily obsessed with being right. Unhealthy, yeah.
eKretz can have all the PhD's and professional work experience in the world, but does that make it ok for him to twist someone else's post out of context so he can correct them? Even setting aside the fact that he is wrong, lol.
So they just get uhhh electroplated with 8.5 mils of iron, and they come out of the bath perfect and smooth? Too thin to do any final machining or polishing, but I can put 50 file strokes on it?
Additional info:
The inside iron layer is different. And I got a piece to peel away, completely. The surface of the copper underneath is silvery all over. The outer layer at the very back looks to be quite a bit thicker than 8.5 mil, but it hasn't peeled. I'm going with 12 mils. Will try to work on it some more. Ahh, the inner part that peeled away is a steel-ish insert. Magnetic, but presumably something more conductive than steel. Then there is a much thinner iron plating on the inside of the barrel, maybe just a few mils, compared to 8 to 12 mils on the outside.
There is almost no silver/iron over the ring at the very back of the tip. The thickness there is almost nil. Like it was cut, there, then plated only very thinly, maybe with just chrome.
Yeah, so Tooku.
Yeah, uh huh, aaaaallll of us are wrong and totally misunderstood what you said? No, it’s more likely that you wrote stuff that’s nonsense, and you just don’t like being called out on it.
You would have some experience with that? I'm not the one that ran away. And I'm not talking about eKretz.
I'm still here, even though the only 2 people that care are just trying to prove my manners are wrong.