Hi All,
I have a Hakko FX951 that's been serving me for 10 years or so. About a year after purchasing it one of the clips on the handle broke, and since they it's been kind of annoying since I would occasionally get a "S-E" (sensor error) on the display when replacing tips. Its easy enough to solve by pushing the tip a bit stronger into the handle, so I wasn't in a hurry to replace it.
Over the years I've purchased a few tips from chinese suppliers. While it is easy enough to notice the difference in quality (takes a bit longer to heat-up, doesn't last as long, etc), they work quite well. Well enough for me to be happy with them for the much lower price. I would probably settle on having a large (10-20 tip styles) of this quality + 2-3 original Hakko tips for the things I use most often.
However, over the years I tried using two different types of FM-2028 handle knock-offs. Both failed miserably I must say. The first, about a year ago was having problematic contacts, and had a stiff cable. The second I've just received a little while ago, and while the cable feels soft enough, it has many other issues (this one was marketed as a KGSER brand, although the handle ha no logo at all):
1 - Visually its different than the original part, and you can see the low quality
2 - The heat-up time is X2 slower than with the original handle + cable.
3 - There is a significant temperature error. I use an external temperature probe (FG100 knock-off I've purchased to re-cal the HAKKO 470 when I've replaced the heater) to verify it. With the original handle, when I set 355C on the unit I measure 356. With the replacement handle its about 60C higher! I've had a look inside, the knock-off unit has just 3 wires instead of 4, so my guess would be that they are sharing a wire between the sensor and the heater, which adds this huge error.
I doubt there's a significant "lesson" to be learned here, since when you get a non-original part, you have no guarantee of quality. However, in some cases the much lower cost is worth the lower quality. I know many other hobbyists, just like me, are considering/using these replacement parts. Therefore I thought I'd share my experience, in case someone is considering these specific parts and would like to know how well they perform.
For the asking price of an original FM-2028 I will most likely keep using my old handle with the broken contact, or only replace the plastic part with the broken clip for a chinese knock-off, this should have no affect on performance.