Yihua 982-iii review

[griz17]

Hi guys, does anyone have any review on this soldering station? It is 30W/40W JBC clone c210 c115 tips, thanks

[psitem]

Well, I took a chance on it since Amazon could deliver the C245 version the next morning. I'm coming from a genuine Pinecil v2 with just the bundled tip. Until a few months ago I'd never touched a soldering iron to something without ruining it, but since needing to... not ruin things... I've probably done a thousand joints adding headers to MCUs and various other boards.

The whole thing in the box weights 35 ounces. There are no instructions in the box. Changing settings involves holding one or both buttons while powering on (C/F, English/Chinese, Temp offset). Mine arrived set to F and English. It sleeps at 200C. After a while sleeping the display shows a coffee cup and after a much longer while it turns off completely and the power switch must be cycled. The attachments can attach to either side. The cord material feels the same as every random USB cable on my desk, not as nice as the silicone cable from Pine64.

The handle connector is a 4-pin that looks very square to my eyes. Not JBC. Seems like that's typical for Yihua? And the original 982 uses a different 5-pin connection? I think that's going to be a deal-breaker for me.

I used the chisel tip to solder headers to 4x Waveshare ESP32-S3-Zero boards with the same random roll of 0.8mm 67/37 1.3% flux from Microcenter that I've been using. My first couple joints at 360C didn't go so great so I bumped it to 370C and it was smooth sailing, no better or worse than I've been doing with the Pinecil set to 360C. I don't have anything to check the tip temperature with so 🤷‍♂️

[psitem]

It sleeps at 200C. After a while sleeping the display shows a coffee cup and after a much longer while it turns off completely and the power switch must be cycled.

I let it sit a very long while and did not experience this "turned off completely" state again, so I guess it may have crashed that time. Or maybe it was user error with the switch but that feels like I'm gaslighting myself. From the 200C sleep to 370C it's 5-6 seconds. In the coffee cup state it seems to power off the iron completely and takes around 10 seconds to reach 370C from room temp. Those include the time for the screen to update to reflect that the iron has been un-docked, which is around a full second. From a cold power on to 370C is about 12 seconds.

That's plenty fast for me but it is a bit slower than my Pinecil on a 65W adapter. The temperature displayed has been stable, with no overshoot, while I've used and fiddled with it. My Pinecil jumps around a bit just sitting there.

The solder holder bracket is a couple mm too narrow for the dowel, which is the same dowel I received with a Yihua X-2 stand. Nothing a bit of careful bending can't fix but it was definitely closer to square as I received it than after I "fixed" it.