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I found this hot air station that could be interesting.
It looks a lot like a Quick 861DW with the same specs but has a touch screen instead of buttons.
If it's the same quality as the Quick it will be a good competitor. At $182 shipped it's quite a bit cheaper!
Really curious to see a review of this one.
http://www.szbesttool.com/products/BST-863-Best-Quality-High-Power-1200W-Digital-Touch-Screen-Display-Hot-Air-Heat-Gun-SMD-Rework-Desol.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Lead-free-Adjustable-Hot-Air-Rework-Station-Soldering-Touch-Screen-LCD-1200W-220V-For-Phone-CPU/32919021140.html?spm=2114.search0104.0.0.3fca14e3XLdRup -
Looks like the same but inside can be different. Also i don't recommend Touch Screen, that tiny buttons will make your life hard and it can have problems, imagine the touch screen stop to work, imagine touch screen all messy from your fingers and dirt.
Go Quick much more pratical and you know it's good, that touch screen is just a fancy marketing for noobs -
What I think is a bit odd about that, is in the specification it never mentions the airflow in Litres per Minute anywhere. It just says Airflow 0-100 but that doesn't mean anything at all does it? Shame someone hasn't reviewed one of these though
Rich -
Totally agree about the touch screen. Just curious what's inside.
And IF it's on par with the Quick then the price is awesome.
Just hoping to find an in depth review. -
Looks like the same but inside can be different. Also i don't recommend Touch Screen, that tiny buttons will make your life hard and it can have problems, imagine the touch screen stop to work, imagine touch screen all messy from your fingers and dirt.
Yep, that display is actually quite small for touch buttons to be any good.
Go Quick much more pratical and you know it's good, that touch screen is just a fancy marketing for noobs -
And a whole 4th button on the screen for just setting Celsius/Fahrenheit each time you are setting temperature is a waste of space and crap interface design. Also apparently you cannot adjust temperature and airflow without going into menu separately for each of them.
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Not sure what happened there. But it ate my comment / reply. I am a new to the forum.
Photos of insides, all thanks to @LegacyCode
https://imgur.com/a/7J6rcGy
Please take above photos ^^ and attach them to 1st post at top of thread. Thank you.
Here are any other photo(s) that are not in above link:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/414286193124048906/508046613286092810/ProShot_20181102_233405.jpg
These photos may be deleted in future. So please somebody re-attach them here. I cannot as a new user - the forum does not let me. -
Hi. This station looked very tempting to me and I bought it. This thread is the first result that shows up on google, so I thought there might be others who will search for this and decided to post here. It cost about €150 for the 230v version shipped to Europe. I don’t have a quick 861dw to compare this to, but man this thing is a flamethrower. Heats up in an instant and has adequate airflow. It’s on par with weller wtha 1, the only high end hot air station I currently have access to compare with. On a quick glance it seems to use a different heating element than the quick. The air pump is also different, it’s loud. I did a teardown, the insides look similar to the quick, but not entirely the same. The build quality is somewhat lower than the quicks. I’ll post some pics later.
User interface is bearable, it makes a beep when you press/touch a button, and beeps constantly when holding down a button to quickly change temp/air flow. Which I found quite annoying. Thank god they decided to leave physical preset buttons, so you won’t spend much time fiddling with the touch screen. All in all I think it’s a great station, a good bang for the buck/euro. -
wtha 1 has only half of max airflow Quick 861DW provides. So if BEST knockoff station has about the same airflow, then it's worse than quick in this regard.
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As I said, it definitely has a different air pump from the quick, judging from quick teardown videos and comments about how quiet the quick is. I can’t really compare the airflow by feel, but I think it is adequate. Considering the fact that the bst-863 is almost half the price of the quick, I can live and work with that.
Edit: I talked to my coworker who works with the weller daily and is more familiar with it. He said that the bst-863 has higher airflow. -
About touch sensitive keys. Take look at advertisement picture and proportion hand and hotgun.
Like inflatable swimming pool with 2m diameter and ten happy people inside
Anyway I decided to order one.
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I sold the bst-863 to my workplace and got a quick. First impression of the quick is that it is definately much quieter, and it takes a while for it to spin up the air pump. While the bst station reaches it’s max speed almost instantly. The quick probably uses a soft start mechanism. The airflow is similar, would like to do a proper test sometime.
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Perhaps for the BST-863 there is the potential to quieten it down a bit. Thought careful modifications. I would hope so, since it is otherwise a very good station.
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Point taken. I have emailed BEST company representative. So as to give feedback about this. Perhaps they can change that part (the controls), for a future product to replace the current BST-863 station.
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Just in case anyone is interested, here are the insides of the BST-863. Seems pretty good to me, I've used the Quick 856AD extensively and it pretty much does the same job (without the footpedal). Regarding the touch screen, it seems to work through gloves, but once you've set the presets you'd not need to touch the screen anyway.
Product link is here: https://bit.ly/2XRCkAQ
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Yeah I use the same temperature 99% of the time so a few presets is fine: heatshrink, reflow high/low air flow maybe. Seems like a good deal.
Quick on sale for $265: https://www.tequipment.net/Quick/861DW/Desoldering-Equipment/Rework-Stations/
This one is $172: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32969155119.html
Would be nice if they could do a "high quality" version of the brushless in handle type: high temp silicone cable, ~800W+ heater, etc. -
Can you do a breakdown of the handle construction. Not a full breakdown but just to see the metal and handle.
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Hi all,
just received mine and I'm a bit worried. It worked when I first powered it up but ever since it behaves like the handle is in the stand all the time, or at least similarly. If I pick up the handle, the display goes bright but the fan won't spin up and (luckily) the heating element stays cold as well. The stopwatch is running though. After two or three seconds, the moon icon appears in the display. Putting the handle back will set the display backlight brightness down considerably. Nothing else happens.
I can adjust temperature and airflow with the touch screen buttons as shown in the reviews but it never has any effect. Just like a fuse was blown right in my first round of tests?
I also found that keeping the preset buttons down in order to store the current settings won't work. It will immediately switch to whatever is behind the button (400, 350, 300°C), and not overwrite these settings with mine.
So that's not going too well then. Returning to Banggood might get troublesome, in my recent experience anything that is returned to China is getting lost on the way and no refund is being paid.
I'll see what I can do about this. Maybe somebody has an idea. If I manage to repair it somehow, I'll let you all know. I might get to take a peek inside the handle and send some photos even though it's probably not the fault location.
Cheers,
Joe -
I also have the BST-863, and here is what I've figured out.
Inside the handle there's a reed relay that reacts to magnets inside the handle stand. The handle must be in the stand - i.e. the relay must be closed - when the unit is powered on - else it will not work. I found that the magnets in my stand was too weak to close the reed relay. If I held a strong external magnet adjacent to the stand, it would work.
The 2 cavities in the stand are not fully populated with magnets, and it is possible to add more to make it more reliaible. The magnets inside the stand are glued. Use a citrus based dissolver (glue remover) if you want to get them out. One suggestion is to move all magnets to one side only, in order to make a stronger field closer to the reed relay.
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@xlnx: excellent, you're right. The machine must be off before picking up the handpiece. I could not stand the buzzer any longer so I opened the BST anyway and desoldered the speaker. It was quite some ordeal as the display sits on top of the solder joints so the display needs to be desoldered as well, with 12 board-to-board interconnects which are soldered on both sides. Bastards.
I decided to put two 1/10" sockets and shorten the pins accordingly so it still fits, just in case I need to revisit this side of the board. Works beautifully. (sorry, no photos of this)
I perceived the buzzer as ten times louder than the rest of the device, and feared it would annoy the sh*t out of my neighbours.
So it's awesome now. Thank you all!
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Just in case anyone is interested, here are the insides of the BST-863.
Hi there, watched your video today on this station. Quick question: do you have any line of contact to the Best company? Because it would be nice to give a user feedback directly to them about the user interface. Having digital rotary dials / rotary encoder instead of the touchscreen is definately preferred. As it allows much faster and more pleasant setting of the temperature and airspeed. - not just me who thinks this, many of us do and it's glaringly obvious.
Others (well, Lois) have also previously commented about the need for dials as when you have your head to the microscope. Well then you cannot actually see the controls on the hot air station without taking away your head from the microscope. Then putting it back again afterwards into the eyepieces. That is where the dials can really help. Do you can quickly turn up/down tweak the temp or airflow away off the baseline preset (as required) for whatever you are blowing at. Since some objects on the PCB have a higher thermal mass, whilst others not. Let's please make this process a more pleasant and rewarding experience. Well that is a way how it can be done.
A good question to be thinking about if there is no stop point on the dial, and it's a continuous rotation. Then having the station chirp or beep at you at coarser temperature increments (For example every 20C) might also be helpful here. To keep track of how far the temperature has changed whilst adjusting it. But buzzers can be pretty annoying. A better solution is just really good haptic feedback on the dial itself. Where the increments are easy to feel. Preferably with a fixed with a stop point at the far end of the adjustment range. I have seen other solutions be implemented very well (and digitally) on other test equipment such as bench supplies etc. by having actually 2 dials for the 1 control. To let the user adjust in both coarse and fine increments. This then permits both a fixed stop point, and a wide adjustment range. With very fast user adjustment to dial in the desired value.
BEST Company - please implement this! Isn't it the Best way?
Another point which you noticed in your review was the amount of air blowing. In this scenario a digital option in the settings to switch between logarithmic and linear scaling of the airflow control - could potentially also be helpful.
After having seen your teardown I really agree overall that this bst-863 station is really the Best one out there right now... haha. Excuse the joke. But it could be better with a refresh / revamp the design. Just keeping everything same except for the front panel and it's controls. That would be perfection
Here is my existing / previous discussion on this matter. Since there is now this other product with such type of dials control https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/new-hot-air-rework-station-nt-861dw-quick-(not-quick!)-761dw/msg2707394/#msg2707394
However it's not very likely to have such a great quality of build, which we would also like to see. All together in the same device. -
If you could buy either of these, which one would you buy?
Weller WTHA-1, Quick-861DW, or Best BST-863? -
If you could buy either of these, which one would you buy?
Weller WTHA-1, Quick-861DW, or Best BST-863?
I made that decision last night. I did not look at the Weller but I had the Quick and the Best in the shopping cart because I kept going back and forth. In the end, I went with the Best. I noted a couple of important (to me) differences between the two. There are many versions of the Quick on the Aliexpress website, 900, 1,000 and 1,300 watts. The prices ranged from just over $200 to the mid $300. The Best is 1200 watts and cost me $168 with free shipping to the US.
I am not too concerned about the touch screen because I plan on using the presets most of the time. That should cut down on some of the wear and tear.
Stay tuned...
-G
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Hi JohnnyG56, could you please share your experience with BST-863 so far? I am trying to decide which hot air station to get.