New Weller Station: Weller WE1010

[tooki]

One should always know Their History before making any judgments; or before getting even impressed by any 'Marketing achievement' stunts!

Well, it seems that ERSA (in the pre-war Berlin, during the very early Twenties) was the first company that ever built a production soldering iron, in worldwide scale; yes, the first one, ever!

No, probably not:

https://stevenjohnson.com/soldering/history.htm

Weller, instead, was founded much later in time, during the early Fifties, by some homonymous 'American investor' in the bankrupted and in an extremely very fast pace developing Western Germany of those times (right after the Marshall Plan and the Mutual Security Act that took over the 'business')...

I don’t think any of that is correct. Weller started production in 1946 in Pennsylvania IIRC.

[A Hellene]

Maybe... Nothing is clear these days...

Yet, I insist not being a fan of Weller and their technological or marketing acrobatics.


-George

[ElectronicCat]

Does anyone know why the EU model is so expensive? I'm in need of a new soldering station and the WE1010 looks perfect for me, and the $100US makes it a bargain. However in the UK the cheapest I've been able to find the 230V model is £150 from Reichelt (~$215US, over double the US price!). It's almost cheaper to import one and buy a step down transformer.

[Deridex]

Does anyone know why the EU model is so expensive? I'm in need of a new soldering station and the WE1010 looks perfect for me, and the $100US makes it a bargain. However in the UK the cheapest I've been able to find the 230V model is £150 from Reichelt (~$215US, over double the US price!). It's almost cheaper to import one and buy a step down transformer.

I also wondered, why it is so expensive. So far i did not find any explanation.
I Think in this pricerange there are competitors that can easily keep up, if not outperform the Weller WE1010. Maybe it's better then to look elsewhere. 

[ElectronicCat]

I also wondered, why it is so expensive. So far i did not find any explanation.
I Think in this pricerange there are competitors that can easily keep up, if not outperform the Weller WE1010. Maybe it's better then to look elsewhere.

I was hoping that maybe the price is only temporarily high whilst it's new and limited stock but it's selling for about what Weller have listed the RRP as on their website, which is considerably more than the US price.

What would you suggest in this price range? I've always had off-brand irons before and whilst some have been ok they've never really lasted that long so I want to get something from a decent brand. The only other one which comes to mind is the Hakko FX-888D, but I'm really not a fan of the weird 2-button interface and 7-segment display.

[Deridex]

I think the Hakko-Stuff is pretty good even though i don't like it's look. But comon, it's a tool, so the look is usally not so important.
Another station you might want to look at, are the Ersa I-Con Pico or Nano.  Even though it seems like there price increased also over the last years. I paid for my Pico  ~116€.

[Rooster Cogburn]

I bought a WE1010, despite the 169EUR price it goes for here. The build quality seemed excellent to me. Case, handle, cable, UI all nice, etc. Performance was rather bad, though. In Dave's review he had a ~30C discrepancy between what he set the station to and the actual tip temperature. Mine was even larger, so large in fact that the range of the build in offset was not sufficient. Set at 300C I'd measure ~240C at the tip. Thermal capacity and heating response was similarly terrible. With the already low temperature wiping the tip 1-2x would drop it below the melting point and solidified, jagged solder starts tearing up the sponge. Plugged into a power meter it's obvious that the iron needs a second or two to even start heating back up and it takes quite a while to get back to normal.

I returned it for a refund. Considering you can get an integrated tip/heater/sensor type iron like the TS12/TS100 for <20EUR/<40EUR respectively, it seems ridiculous to charge 169EUR for this. Given that the performance of this is worse than the more modern designs, the only thing the Weller really has going for it is the brand name and the expectation of quality that goes along with it. But if I see Dave's review model being off by 30C, mine being off by 50-100C, I don't know what I'm paying all this money for. I clearly got a dud, but I think even if mine had worked as designed I still would've been unhappy with the heating stability, speed & recovery.

After recently having to endure three separate speaker repairs from a major German brand, I think I'll no longer give money to my fellow countrymen and go for Chinese products instead