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JBC CD-1BQE

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labjr:
I've been thinking about replacing my 25 yr old Weller station for a couple years now but haven't pulled the trigger. I service mostly older pro audio, stereo equipment with through-hole parts and point-to-point wired vacuum tube stuff. The fact that I've had the Weller for 25 years is telling. That thing fell into a bucket of water ten years ago and survived. Reliability is one of the criteria for my purchase. But An OLED display that tells me the date is not. Cost of consumables is also important to me. I don't want to be changing a $30 tip every two weeks. I don't want to be fiddling with bad connectors and strange temperature issues or a switching power supply with Sungwa caps when I have a job to do. I don't buy tools at Harbor Freight because I expect my equipment to work when I need to use it .

exe:

--- Quote from: labjr on June 11, 2019, 03:22:24 pm ---But An OLED display that tells me the date is not.

--- End quote ---

Afaik it's a cheap standard module that cost $5-9 or so.


--- Quote from: labjr on June 11, 2019, 03:22:24 pm ---I don't want to be changing a $30 tip every two weeks

--- End quote ---

Common tips are about $5 as well... You can also buy original Hakko cartridges, if needed.

Anyway, if you do things professionally and can justify the price of a good station then there is probably nothing to discuss. Chinese clones obviously cannot provide same confidence as established brands, that's how those brands survive :).

I myself started doing electronics when I didn't have a stable income, so I had to stick to solutions that didn't require much investment upfront. So, I wasn't given a choice of buying a cheap station, or a rework station from JBC with full set of tools and cartridges :). Now I can buy any station I want, but with my modest soldering needs I don't the point, nor I want to support ridiculous pricing and artificial market segmentation most brands try to do.

Shock:

--- Quote from: exe on June 11, 2019, 02:33:12 pm ---I still think there is a lot of room to make branded products more accessible. Plus, for some reason, for example, ads200 costs ~%50 more in Europe than in US. While KSGER has same price everywhere. Not to say there are no artificial limitations which many big vendors like to put to segment the market and make maximum profit. This used to work, but...  I'd say the market landscape is changing, will see what's going to happen next.

BTW, is there really that big demand for certified hand-soldering stations? Who buys them (except mil/gov)? I doubt a typical repair shop would care about certs.

--- End quote ---

Pace are shipped to the UK and then the rest of Europe distributors as far as I'm aware, so tax and currency conversion plus shipping doesn't help, I think their MSRP is quite reasonable considering costs of importing from the US. Pace stations in the past were fairly expensive.

Aside from the MSRP distributors set their own price at the end of the day, all you can do is look for the cheapest or go on Amazon or Ebay and see if you can find the Euro voltage version at a decent price.

Any manufacturer that has standards compliance and does hand soldering, so anything to do with safety and critical systems, medical, aviation, automotive, energy, telecommunications.

The market landscape would change overnight if someone did an exposé on how many non safety compliant imports there are in the wild. Most of them are only picked up when someone gets hurt.

labjr:
Pace was fairly expensive here in the US until the ADS200 came out. Obviously, the lower price was meant to compete with Hakko. I think the US version of the ADS200 can be rewired for 220V but I haven't checked it myself. Someone here in the US could probably ship one to anyone who used a freight forwarding service.

I also expect that someone, at some point will make a drop in controller PCB for the ADS200 that has a better UI.

Shock:

--- Quote from: labjr on June 11, 2019, 05:06:28 pm ---Pace was fairly expensive here in the US until the ADS200 came out. Obviously, the lower price was meant to compete with Hakko. I think the US version of the ADS200 can be rewired for 220V but I haven't checked it myself. Someone here in the US could probably ship one to anyone who used a freight forwarding service.
--- End quote ---

Unless someone has checked the transformer assume it's a no, they have always sold a separate US and Europe version.

You would have to look for Aaron Caplans exact quote but I believe they lowered the station price and with that expected to sell more tips/consumables. So it sounded like changing their sales model rather than move in on someones turf. But yes they are competing with Hakko and JBC, especially in the prosumer market now.

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