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Bought a new soldering iron a few months ago, figured that instead of continually buying the elcheapo unit's I'd spend a little more and buy something that is easily serviced, one that doesn't end up with the tip swelled up in the unit, preventing you cleaning / swapping it..

Spent 80 bucks on this one, pretty happy with it.
Made in Japan, tips don't seem to get eaten by the soldering fluid I'm always using to keep it clean when soldering, when it reaches temp it turns off, doesn't sit there burning away killing the tip, takes 29 seconds to reach full temp, and when using the .3mm tip, does a pretty neat job at soldering the chip mounts in the memcals without filling the hole full of solder or burning the surrounding plastic, it almost looks factory, just soldered this in this arvo, glad I spent the extra dollars..

Those soldering irons are great to keep handy and would be fine for doing memcal swaps, especially handy to keep in the car for a pinch, though big issues with them is the heat, hard set at 320c which is way to hot if your doing SMD or smaller stuff on circuit boards it'l just burn right through it or damage components. I use the Hakko FX-888D at work and home, temperature controllable, but it is another $100 more.

I got almost the same model. Mine is about 60w though, goot as well and looks very much the same.

I have had mine for over 10 years and only used about 3 tips in that time and still have the original small tip as I use that the least.

The1 wrote:Those soldering irons are great to keep handy and would be fine for doing memcal swaps, especially handy to keep in the car for a pinch, though big issues with them is the heat, hard set at 320c which is way to hot if your doing SMD or smaller stuff on circuit boards it'l just burn right through it or damage components. I use the Hakko FX-888D at work and home, temperature controllable, but it is another $100 more.

I'll look into that Hakko, thanks..
Though this one didn't kill the GQ4x that was given to me a couple of months ago..
It was a dead unit, seems to have burnt a track between one of the USB connectors on top of the board and the SMD 24R0 resistor after it..
Unfortunately Jaycar didn't have any 24 ohm SMDs in stock, but did have a 220 / 22 ohm, I figured why not, the units dead anyway, I'll chase a 24 ohm up later if I manage to fix it, which to my surprise I did, was pretty happy with that effort..
using the .3mm tip (.011") it soldered the chip onto the board looking like factory, I also piggy backed a .012" wire off of one side and soldered it to the USB pin where the original connected to..
Pics are a bit fuzzy, I need to invest in a camera, one day...

vlad01 wrote:I got almost the same model. Mine is about 60w though, goot as well and looks very much the same.

I have had mine for over 10 years and only used about 3 tips in that time and still have the original small tip as I use that the least.

10 years, that'd be an all time record for me, I'm wrapped if I get 3..

Nice work! I hate waste to and try and repair anything i can, even if im not using it or dont want it if i can give it away then ive saved landfill. If you need electronic parts feel free to pm me i have stacks of old boards and electronics parts at home and work to salvage from, just pay postage.

Ive found over the years to get the tips to last use a wet pad to wipe it clean, also when your finished cover the tip in solder before turning it off, then you have it sealed up until next use, ive never worn out a tip or had issues.

The1 wrote:Nice work! I hate waste to and try and repair anything i can, even if im not using it or dont want it if i can give it away then ive saved landfill. If you need electronic parts feel free to pm me i have stacks of old boards and electronics parts at home and work to salvage from, just pay postage

Ah, so I'm not the only nutter here that tries to re-use as much as possible, I don't feel as out of place now..
EG: Have been involved with computers for 20 something years, became familiar with their failure's and breaking points, and would often end up repairing others computers, (became a sideline business there for a while) one thing that was a common failure around end of P111 to mid P4 era was electrolytic caps failing, I used to wonder how in some cases there'd be 10 - 20 bad caps on a board, and would replace them all in order to keep the system original and avoid having to buy a new board.
When the systems were a failure beyond my capabilities, I'd save every piece I thought I could re-use somewhere else down the track...
Here's an example of caps saved to re-use where possible, though finding the right cap was often a challenge too at times..
Top left is the common MoBo caps bagged that I would often need, though no longer these days, top right is a bag of 1500μF x 400 caps bought from ebay probably 12 odd + years ago, from China, and like most poo bought from the place, every single cap in that bag has the top bulging and spewing liquid, it's not even opened yet, kind of explains why so many caps were going bad on boards there for a few years, wasn't that they were overloaded / over worked, just the cap itself was utter junk.
All caps got tested with a tester I bought as a kit and built 22-3 years ago, never just re-used because they looked good, even some caps that aren't bulged can still be junk..

The1 wrote:Ive found over the years to get the tips to last use a wet pad to wipe it clean, also when your finished cover the tip in solder before turning it off, then you have it sealed up until next use, ive never worn out a tip or had issues.

Yeah I spray carb cleaner on a rag and twist the tip in the rag to clean it usually when done, I think my problem is continually cleaning the tip whilst in use, with a home made zinc chloride solution that is still slightly acidic, in order to minimize the solder needed for the job, I find constantly keeping the tip clean makes minimal solder on the tip flow into the job pretty good without the constant adding of solder to the tip til it takes, which is probably why I'm getting away with too much heat in the iron, it doesn't need to be held on the job very long to do the job, so little heat is transferred into the parts.

Nice Ken and bit of cap collection there, more dedicated than me, mines just wheelie bins and shelves full of old boards to rummage, from mobo's to CRT boards, ups boards, vcr boards anything really that i scrapped. I must be about the same vintage, i grew up around TV repair shop.

Yep i remember going through the mobo and psu phase when all the crap caps were used and regularly needed changing.

I still have my old Bob Parker ESR Cap tester, but recently picked up one of these, handy for quick testing alot of other components to like transistors and mosfets.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-sh ... 35838.html

I got a few bits like that but no where near that much. I got a nice lot of trays of old stock components from my uncle's LED sign business from 15-20 years ago.

What I have the most of is actually old PC parts, various ram, mother boards, CPUs, heaps of HDDs, DVD burners, floppy drives, GPUs, sound cards etc.. and tons of cables and network bits and bobs.

Another bit lot I got is heaps of engine harness supplies, GM colour coded wires, Delphi terminals and connectors, harness protection and mounting stuff etc.. I got enough to supply myself for a couple of full harnesses from scratch.

The1 wrote:I still have my old Bob Parker ESR Cap tester, but recently picked up one of these, handy for quick testing alot of other components to like transistors and mosfets.

Here's my old nugget, took a week of nights to assemble from scratch, half of which was because nothing fitted into the case even remotely close.
I remember thinking half way through the task, I should've paid the top dollar for the built one and made money doing work in the time it took me to assemble it, would've been cheaper in the end..

The1 wrote:https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-sh ... 35838.html

How cheaps that, I'm sure the sum I paid for my old cap testing kit that I had to assemble was probably 10 times+ that amount, and doesn't do much more than caps..

vlad01 wrote:What I have the most of is actually old PC parts, various ram, mother boards, CPUs, heaps of HDDs, DVD burners, floppy drives, GPUs, sound cards etc.. and tons of cables and network bits and bobs.

Same here, though probably way more than I should have.
Last time I spoke to my brother on the phone, he reckons he's going to try gold recovery from some ram ans cpu's, I said excellent, I'll drop you a sample to experiment with til you get a system worked.
Dug these out for him to try, just old P1's mostly 80502's, some nuggety duron's and celerons.
The rams just the 32 / 64mb sticks for now, and some fast page edo, nothing of worth to me.
I filled a 10 liter box with ram, 5 liter of cpu's..

vlad01 wrote:Another bit lot I got is heaps of engine harness supplies, GM colour coded wires, Delphi terminals and connectors, harness protection and mounting stuff etc.. I got enough to supply myself for a couple of full harnesses from scratch.

Yeah you'll want to think hard though about what you chop up and re-use, Iv'e had boxes of harness / cables from my early holden days as a lad, some of what I'd chopped were battery leads and accessory plugs and whatnot off old harness's, a few years ago a mate stated he sold an old HR battery lead on ebay for $160, I thought no, Iv'e got plenty, heh, yeah, plenty with the ends missing, though I did have one unmolested one, he listed it on ebay for me, sold for $145 or 148, somewhere in that range.

Dude you should be selling those CPUs. They are worth a good amount these days as they are all collectable by retro/vintage PC guys. Gold recovery from those are a negative endeavor, there might be only $40 worth total from the CPUs and RAM. Sell the CPUs, many of those are worth from $5-30 each depending on rarity/popularity. RAM is stuff all but even $10 for a set should sell.

here see what I mean. Durons for example were very well regarded back then and now among collectors. Better than the 10c worth of gold and few $ of wasted chemicals.

https://www.ebay.com.au/sch/i.html?_fro ... 0&_sacat=0

Pentium overdrive which looks to be half your box. Even better!

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Intel-SL2RM ... ctupt=true


All my stuff is post 00. mainly Althon 64 and Opteron server CPUs. Heaps of ECC DDR ram. I got some late 00 stuff too.