Solder Peak SP-1010DR (ZD-915 rebrand) teardown

[jonatanrullman]

Necroing my own thread a bit here with a few possibly helpful comments as I have finally gone back and modded this station a fair bit.

Truth be told, it has seen pretty limited use because I found it a bit odd to use and then I accidentally dropped the gun, which broke, and it took me like a year to get round to buying the spare part. But anyway.

The main thing I wanted to do was the diode mod but it did cause me a fair bit of grief. Hence this post for anyone stumbling across this in the future.

I bought ten of the 1N5406 for about a dollar. At first I tried to do it the way mos6502 showed, only I used the existing holes and cut the PCB traces with a knife. It was incredibly fiddly to fit them all and then it didn't work. Trying to measure it I got really inconsistent results, possibly because I damaged one of the diodes trying to fit them and probably because I didn't realise that measuring all five in series maxes out the cheap multimeter I used.

So I decided to remove everything and start over. I used the other five diodes but this time I placed them all side by side with a small gap and made a series of U-bends with the legs to solder them in one continuous length as a separate assembly. I then soldered it to the first and last hole in the PCB, essentially just using it as a convenient mount with the connectors already in place. I would love to show a photo of this here but I don't want to. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with the quality of the soldering job. I would highly suggest doing it this way. There really is no need to make it complicated by using the PCB traces simply to tie together the legs of the diodes.

However it still didn't work and it turns out that the polarity is the other way round in my machine, so I had to reverse all three connectors to get it to work, which was easier than desoldering the diodes and turing them around.

I also tidied everything up a bit with zip ties, removed the shield from the SMPS, cut away the fan grill with a pair of side cutters, fitted a relay and used one of the leftover 1N5406 diodes as a flyback, though that is possibly not the best choice I ever made (my grasp of this subject is really sketchy).

Cheers

[higbo]

Hello! Would it be possible to connect any soldering iron to this desoldering station? Has anybody tried it? I just don't have enough space for two units on my desk unfortunately.