After watching
Dave's Soldering Iron Power Delivery video I decided to buy a new JBC CD-1BQE soldering station. I own a Hakko FX951 which is nice but, like the 888D, it has the issue that it can't keep up with high heat-sink soldering jobs. For a long time, I've owned and used an Aoyue 2900 soldering station with the tips that plug into the handle and this has worked OK but the build quality of the Aoyue is poor to say the least, the elements have intermittent contact in the handle which I solve by twisting them around but, whenever this happens, the base unit beeps loudly. The plastic cover over the buttons keeps coming off but the heat performance of the Aoyue is the only thing I have that works for parts like large SMT power transistors that I have designed heatsink vias onto the PCB for and I'd like a better tool for that role.
The Aoyue seems to be no longer available so, given that this is a tool of my trade, I decided to order the JCB which was a brand I wasn't even aware existed until I saw Dave's video and, at $500 for the JBC 1BQE + 3 tips (C245001, C245030, and C245061) from Tequipment.net (with the eevblog discount) it's
VERY expensive IMHO. Hope I'm going to like it.
If I weren't so busy, I'd design a replacement base unit for the $74 T210 handle as an open source project; from
this thread it seems the design of the JBC base unit isn't that good.
Once my new JCB soldering station arrives, I'll let you know what I think.