The issue is of heat sensing. Rather than smooth cycling of the heater, movement of the tip seems to trigger the heater on or of (or frequently cycling between the two)
Additionally temperature does not seem to be held.
I attempted to
turn off/turn on the unit
increasing the temperature setting
Tighten the tip holder / metal barrel of the iron(it was already tight)
swap the irons between the two units to isolate the fault; however it was so firmly jammed in that it was not easily removable from the unit, so I refrained
Hi…actually you explained the all things and also tried the best troubleshoot method. From your post it is looking that the problem is only there in the soldering iron part. Try to change its element. Also check the wire. The best is to replace it with new one.
Yeah, the current soldering irons need to be replaced. Unfortunately, to get new ones in I have to buy them with my own cash and get refunded. Unfortunately I’ve been struggling to save some cash for the past few months which is why the electronics bench has been neglected. I’ll see what I can do.
If you give the Treasurer a list of items, then they can purchase it from the main account.
I’m unsure if it’s the iron that is the problem or just that the tip is too small for most jobs.
The other problem with the soldering station is patience.
They are slow to heat up and results with people crank the heat to Max shorting the life of the iron and tips.
Please don’t save up for super duper irons, our current set get treated like crap and they’d die quickly.
The <50$ irons we use now are fine for most uses. I’d rather have many of those than 1-2 expensive oki/metcal/hakko/jbc irons that don’t work because people don’t know what they’re doing.
Ignore the ebay misused keywords in the title, but this is what we have right now:
It’s a Hakko 936 clone, and the 936 was arguably one of the best accessible prosumer irons I’ve ever used. If we get a stock of these, plus a set of tips per machine (and another set spare per machine just in case) and put the tips on the iron we’re set.
That’s maybe $50 per iron total, with two sets of tips.
I’d be keen to go for something a bit bigger in line with @lhovo, the current irons require patience and are rather slow to heat up. Having something that comes up to temp quicker would be much more ideal.
I would really really like to work with someone on building a control box for some of the Curie-based tips.
“All” we need is 17 or 24 MHz at 100w, with something to sense when the impedence changes to drop into low power mode.
The after-market handles and tips that are coming out are starting to be quite affordable (about 2x the price of an aftermarket thermocouple tip), it’s just the base stations that are unbelievably pricy