You've probably seen these dirt cheap soldering stations on eBay; they can be had for just under $40 AUD delivered. I think a lot of the people with the branded stations will probably just dismiss them as cheap Chinese trash, but here is a review with pictures. I've had mine for about a year, using it pretty frequently. I got mine off ebay for under $40, just search "936C soldering station" and you'll get a ton of hits.
The unit: This is the unit, pretty standard; it’s got temperature control, the holder with sponge. It’s the 220v version and the cord is directly wired to the station. They provide the unit with an adapter for the mains plug for your country. Unfortunately because the power cord is wired directly to the unit, you’ll have to mod the power cord to change the plug. Would not be difficult due to the simple wiring inside though.
This is the soldering pencil dismantled. At the base of the heating element theres a temperature sensor for the feeedback loop. Surprisingly, spare parts are readily avaliable on ebay. The iron came with a super fine conical tip which was utterly useless for general soldering. Its only useful for very small components because of the heat capacity.
I bought a chisel tip off ebay for a few dollars. Suprisingly the chisel tip came in Hakko packaging and the tip was tinned. Very happy with it.
One of the huge advantages of this iron is that it accepts standard Hakko 900M tips. The soldering pencil plug on the front of the unit is not Hakko compatible though. From the front of the unit you can see it has temperature control. The LED on the left lights up when the unit is heating up and goes out when it’s up to temperature. It’s running on a feedback loop so typically when its reached a steady state you’ll see the LED blinking on and off every couple seconds or so.
One important aspect of an iron is the time it takes to heat up. From cold, the iron took 52 seconds for the LED to go out and could melt solder. Certainly acceptable, those cheap Jaycar/DSE firesticks take ages to heat up. This thing is advertised as 50w iron, if you don’t trust the specs here’s the reading from a power meter:
The holder comes with a sponge in a removable tray. What I found was that the ring (marked in red) was painted with a paint that was unable to withstand the heat of the iron. So you get tiny bits of melted paint on the iron which is a pain. I ended up sanding the ring to bare metal and now its fine. The paint ends up flaking off when you do this so didn’t take me long. This is the only real gripe I have about the quality of the iron.
Dismantling:Sorry, I did try to get the front panel off but it requires desoldering of the socket and I didn't want to attack it with my old firestick soldering iron.
Seems to be pretty simple construction, we have a single sided PCB on the front and most of the box is dominated by the transformer.
The tip is indeed grounded to mains earth. On the right the earth wire goes to the front panel to the front socket.
The PCB is just a single sided board and all the components are through–hole.
Most of the joints are quite good, looks like its gone though a wave soldering process. However, the wiring is soldered by hand on the production line and theres some flux residue. All the joints look fine though.
The left blob of goo is for the fuse on the top of the board, probably to reduce the possiblity of arcing on failiure. The glass fuse is soldered in, so it would be quite annoying to replace, especially having to remove all the goo.
Verdict:Overall, I quite like the station, its served me well over the past year and works very nicely. Two things I’d recommend:
- Get a chisel tip, the fine conical tip is useless
- Sand off the paint on the rim of the holder
I've used this thing for general purpose through hole and SMD soldering, drag soldering for ICs up 0.5mm pitch with absolutely no problems. I think the quality overall is quite decent and certainly not worthy of being called cheap chinese junk. Sure a lot of stuff coming out of eBay is very questionable, I bought a hot glue gun from ebay that was downright dangerous in terms of how it was wired to the mains. But this is certainly worth a look if you want a decent iron.