Electronics > Beginners
Should I be worried about tip lifetime when buying my first soldering station?
vk6zgo:
--- Quote from: Domagoj T on May 07, 2019, 09:46:25 am ---
--- Quote from: blueskull on May 07, 2019, 07:49:32 am ---If you use a reasonable temperature, and you don't use that stupid water sponge, plus you actually put the iron back to its auto-sleep cradle every time after use, they will last.
--- End quote ---
What do you use for cleaning the tip?
I use the stupid wet sponge and get years out of the original Weller tips. I have the temp set at around 300°C for 90% of the work I do.
The iron doesn't have the autosleep (it's Weller PU 81 base with WSP 80 iron).
I don't consider the cost of tips to be relevant at all, provided you buy quality tips and not just a piece of copper wire, that will melt away in literary couple of hours, as was the case when I had no access to a proper iron and had to make do with a $6 supermarket abomination.
--- End quote ---
I, too, use the "stupid wet sponge" with my old Weller WTCP, & get good life out of the tips.
In my experience, the only thing that kills tips prematurely with the WTCP is when the thermal switch gets stuck "on".
This should not be a problem with a modern continuously temperature controlled iron, however.
I believe that people have become altogether too "precious" about such things as "temperature shock" ----- it's a lump of metal with a bit of plating on it, for Pete's sake!
The very cheap "pretend" solder stations with a surplus lamp dimmer doing the temperature control will kill their tips in no time, but with a good quality station the tips should last for years with the low level of use the OP proposes.
tooki:
--- Quote from: KL27x on May 08, 2019, 10:04:39 pm ---I've never used a Xytronic, but I've heard nothing but good about them.
--- Quote --- But anyway the i-Tool is 9 seconds to reach 350C so a higher performing iron.
--- End quote ---
The time to warm up depends on the mass of the tip. Lighter tips will heat up faster, but heavier tips will increase performance in many ways. The Hakko 951 tips have in some cases about half the copper of the similar style 888 tip, for instance. So it should not be a surprise that they heat up faster. The tips for that 3200 look pretty hefty. Also some irons might "cheat" on the warm up time. They may have a cold boot algorithm. But in operation, it won't perform like that by default, unless you use an "overdrive setting" that allows more overshoot and reduced tip life.
--- End quote ---
The Ersa i-Con series has three power settings, which applies equally to initial power up and during use. The default is the medium setting which allows slight overshoot. The low setting allows none (but heats more slowly) and the high one allows more overshoot but faster heating. A bar graph on the display shows how much energy is actually being pumped into the heater.
stj:
i think tip life is mostly down to the flux formulation in the solder,
in the past when i used 60/40 with rosin flux from wherever, i went through tips relativly fast,
now i use 100% lead-free and select solder/flux like a wine conosour the tips arent wearing down!!!
Reiska:
I know what I'm looking at are way overkill to my current needs and probably for my future needs as well, but I'm not going to buy another soldering station during this lifetime if I can avoid it so I'd rather just get the best available within some reason in price (e.g. no 1000€+ reworking stations unless I get good enough to start reflowing my broken iMac's GPU's at some point :-P).
I know I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to tools, but was brought up by my grandad (who was an electrician and a carpeter) that poor people can't afford buying cheap equipment.
I've added to that my own maxim that "busy people with kids don't have time to waste on clunky tools when they finally find the nonexistent time to actually do hobby stuff".
Therefore I'm ok with dropping 500-600€ on an excellent station if that then takes care of my needs without waiting, being underpowered, lacking, limiting or otherwise frustrating 6 months from now. For a frame of reference if anyone here does woodworking I use Festool power tools, Veritas planes and chisels, Incra fences and rulers, Pfeil carving chisels and mostly Apple computers at home.
I guess my tip questions sounds now rather academic in retrospect, but I did read some horror stories of people screwing up their tips in days and at 25-75€/tip cartridge every week that adds up quickly so hence my original question.
After reading your replies it seems that with reasonable care tips should last 1+ years in moderate use even if they are of the 'weak' JBC plating thickness variety. So if I have throw 25-100€/year on replacements and new geometry tips it's fine.
The hacker in me would actually want to build a Unisolder 5.2 driver just for the challenge, but looking at the PCB routing it would require a proper soldering station and probably alot more soldering skills than I have to put one together. So maybe that's my next station if I get back into the groove of building my own elctronics. I used to be a fairly active HAM-radio op and built some modems, antennas, amplifiers and silly gadgets like CoVox's for my PC in the day but haven't had time to do electronics for the last 20-odd years.
stj:
there was a russian guy on ebay selling the unisolder pcb's as a kit or pre-built.
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