Post by Steve SchukeiGot one today from thinkgeek, what am I missing? Tool unable to heat
solder up enough to get solder flowing, unable to desolder wires from...well
anything. Tip very fragile. Worthless $30.00 tool or I do not know what I
am doing?
Hey Steve, I got one of these about a week ago.
My experience: They're tricky to use and you need *really good* batteries,
or the thing just won't work - it'll heat things up, but not hot enough. If
the white light on the front of it is going *off* when you're soldering,
your batteries aren't good enough. The white and red LEDs should both be on
during soldering.
It's good for certain things, and really bad at other things. The batteries
get drained very quickly when you're using it for large joints, and by large
joints I'm referring to things such as tabs on microswitches where the
actual surface area is large. Regular joint size for this thing is a
typical PCB component hole where the real surface area is very small.
I found, for example, when trying to use it on a microswitch tab, it was
heating up the entire microswitch a lot, but trying to get it to heat up
locally was difficult.
The tips are very fragile (but it makes no secret of this - don't push on
the joint, it'll just damage the tip).
The biggest thing you have to get used to is that the tip isn't tinned, so
you must have the solder flowing into the joint at all times or you won't
get anywhere. I found it OK for soldering wires together and making joins,
and a few solenoid tabs and things, but it's not a miracle device. You
really need about 10 minutes of practice trying lots of little different
joints on a PCB or something to be able to get the hang of it, and not
simply become frustrated. Again, keeping the solder flowing into the joint
is a key point.
My vote is that it's useful in some circumstances (it does work quite well
on PCBs once you've had some practice with it), but unless you have really
good batteries it's next to useless. I found it handy for desoldering wires
and tabs, mainly because the tip doesn't tin.
This is a case of "you get what you pay for" - it performs about as well as
you would expect a $19.95 USD battery powered soldering tool to.
Zenith.