In Other News... Bang-em-good banged me good.
KSGER Stainless Steel FX-9501 T12 Soldering Iron Handle; $38 from Banggood
"Item NOT As described, defective, not even correct brand. Very disappointed. Please refund immediately."
1 - Arrived with messed up cable visible from outside. This does not bode well.
2 - Cable strain relief messed up; this is what I found after unwrapping. Will need to be completely rewired correctly so cable is affixed inside. grrr.
3 - Can't even get a cartridge into it any further than this. I almost broke the tip trying to get it past old, hard oversized o-ring inside. Just the tip, man.
4 - Some off-brand product, NOT KSGER.
5 - NOT Stainless steel. Magnetic, rusty, just plain cheap chromed steel tube. Utterly unmitigated piece of shit. Nice & skinny grip, though.
Very disappointing. No idea where they got this piece of shit, but this borders on bait & switch. We'll see what they offer. If they demand a video, I'll tell them to go suck a duck and have PayPal handle it.
mnem
Banggood, whatcha doin' widdat duuuuuck?
"Bang-em-good" Bogus KSGER Stainless T12 Handle Revisited: The promised refund went through as expected, so I decided to take a break from my case modding project and had a look at this shiny little turd.
First thing I discovered is that what prevented insertion of a tip was just a stupidly overthick nitrile rubber o-ring. I removed that and found that pretty much all the guts relied on a little bit of glued glass-fiber tubing to hold things together. I tried putting a T12 tip in it, and wound up pushing all the guts out the back end.
After looking the bits over, I discovered it uses a T12 cartridge socket that is different from any I've seen before. This one has a split-ring type contact on the SHELL GND connection; it makes contact with a very satisfying click. The two cartridge power contacts appear to be made of heavier gauge metal than any I've seen elsewhere too.
So after scratching my head a few minutes, I contrived to just drill and tap the tube and this little hole in the T12 socket for a m2.5 x 4mm set screw. Drilling and tapping took but a few minutes; then I discovered my stash of m2.5 grub screws from my RC helicopter daze had been magically replaced with M3, which were just unreasonably oversized.
So I scrounged a m2.5 socket head screw, and fabricated a set screw with my Dremel and a thin cutoff wheel. Hey! Now there's actually a tiny little bit of stainless steel in it!
But alas, the damned thing STILL was not genuine KSGER, so it wasn't wired correctly for my station. However, I found they did at least follow the color code common to most of the aftermarket T12 kit on the market, so all I had to do was move the red, black & blue wires at the plug to where they belong. Ka-Ching!
A little heat-shrink tubing as a strain-relief so the plug matched the handle and we were good to go.
I found that the thin profile of the handle allowed it to just fall through to the plastic base on the original RS iron stand, so I had to dust off the old cast aluminum stand from my Aoyue. It cleaned up respectably well, though.
As a test I decided to give it some heavy gauge steel wire to chew on and made myself a new alligator wire organizer.
I've seen a lot of things made for organizing your alligators, and most LOOK a lot better than an old coathanger... but none I've found actually WORK better. The hook and slim profile lets you hang it off a nail in a wall up out of the way, yet when you need it close you can hang it from your shelving or the edge of your desk. The second string of MIG wire is the right diameter to not damage your j-hook and grabber-style clips too; plus it lets you sort into "alligator both ends" on the lower level, and other types elsewhere. I have several "solder-in" wires I like to clip up at the top by the hook.
Anyways... for the MIG wire to work right here it needs to be pulled and held taut; this requires that it be soldered. A perfect test for my new handle; I plugged in the T12-BC4 "hoof-tip" I use for drag-soldering and cranked up the heat to 360°C. That and a little rosin on the end of my solder made short work of the shellac on the coathanger wire; after one end cooled I pulled the other end taut and held it in place with hemostats while I soldered that section.
If you decide to play along at home and make your own, be sure to let it cool off before you handle it; unlike the TinkerDwagon you probably aren't fireproof!!!
Final verdict?
In all honesty, this handle has a great feel; the grip is thin, the balance is perfect, and it takes just a little work to sort it 100%. I'd gladly pay $15 for this over $7-12 for the plastic FX9501 handle; just NOT $38 when I'm expecting stainless steel and plug & play with my KSGER station. Keep your eyes open to see if BG comes to their senses and reprices the thing appropriately. mnem
*TEA-ily*