the problem with this micro pencil, when you tin large wires or high area of copper. its simply small you cant put force on the tip cos its too fragile, i already bent 1mm from the 90degree angle out when i knocked it out of the magnetic stand with the cable landed on the tip, and grabbed by the cable before it fully hit the wood a good 50cm fall, and the base unit can support up to 150watt, its the single channel version but with the same 150watts of the dual channel, however there are two wd1m station 1 is 80 the other is 150 watts, ohh and the thing loves to heat up the aluminium handle little warm, but not uncomfortable, it heats up mostly when used at 400Celsius or more than 10 minutes, nothing serious, side effect of the metal/metal contact. if someone intrested i can take pics from the thing at any angle
The larger RT11 tip should help though (would think it has more mass as well as surface area).
Since I'm using different irons on a WD1, I don't have that issue. Even the WMP seems to be a bit more sturdy (tip is mostly a stainless steel tube, with the tip just on the end). As both are plastic & silicone (there is metal under the plastic), I don't have the handle heating issue.
I've always wondered about that BTW, so thanks.
Newer ones appear to be aluminum as well. Not sure why they did this other than maybe can take a bit more abuse. But if the tips are that fragile, I'd expect a lot of tip damage before the handle, even if it were plastic.
The tips on the WMP don't have a lot of mass, so the larger iron is needed to tin larger gauge wire (14AWG & up turns out much better on the WP80; possible to go up to 12AWG on the WMP, but I have to crank the temp up substantially to get it done. For a one off, I've done it that way out of laziness. But if I've a few to do, I swap the iron.