Pace ADS200 soldering station

[karamba]

Yes, that's where I bought my from yesterday. No dice with the coupon though. The price is good anyway.

[karamba]

Here is another project to make yourself an instant setback caddy if anyone is interested:
https://getgui.com/blog/diy/pace-instant-setback-cubby-simple-led-light-sensor-switch-circuit/

[thm_w]

I just tried eBay's Memorial Day 20% discount code.  Sadly, it doesn't work for the ADS200 linked above.  That would have been a screaming deal...

Thanks, I should have read closer.. coupon was for select sellers.. Hopefully they will have some more 15-20% off general use coupons in the future.

[Shock]

I wouldn't like to leave anyone with the impression that the sleeve system on the Hakko handpieces is either handy or well thought out. Even the Chinese don't want to copy it.

Believe it or not the Pace tip tool even though the name implies extra work, is in my opinion the best method out there. JBC users might disagree but put a few similar tips face down in their stand and the convenience is lost. With Metcal you had to turn off the stations, other stations have sleeves and collars.

Pace has keyed cartridge tips and it's still incredibly easy with the tip tool.

[karamba]

I painstakingly went through I think all available here options. Most hobby level stations and irons are cheaper. But unless you are excited about new purchases often the ADS200 still comes on top.
KSGER: Questionable quality, which actually can kill you. Not grounded chassis, mains lugs are soldered directly to the PCB so they also act as a mechanical fixture... something I do not want to be bothered with when I am soldering. Besides an ethical issue about "borrowing" Hakko cartridges.
TS100. seems a bit flaky but again a good option if you plan to upgrade in a yer or two to what is better then.
TS80. Cartridges are $30 and very sparce. In long term the price difference will vanish if not get negative. I am also not sure on long term reliability.
All kind of direct Hakko clones I discarded without even looking.
I am left with Hakko 951 which is a toss but ADS is more powerful and much more user friendly.

[labjr]

Here is another project to make yourself an instant setback caddy if anyone is interested:
https://getgui.com/blog/diy/pace-instant-setback-cubby-simple-led-light-sensor-switch-circuit/

The Arduino sensor module seems like the simplest solution, though I haven't tried it.

[karamba]

So here it is, I think it is a beauty :-) Definitely all metal makes it so much different from the contemporary oversees, wink wink :-) stuff.

[tygersmoke]

Hello,

First post from long time lurker, recently signed up.

I am a hobbyist, and I was looking for a replacement for my low end Weller station. I fairly quickly zero-ed in on the Pace ADS200; after reading all 55(!) pages here, it seemed to tick all the boxes once I got past sticker shock. I felt glad I wasn't one of those early adopters back in 2018. I had originally intended to spend about AU$250, but ended up spending a bit over AU$600 on the Pace from the Australian distributor after adding a few tips to the order.

As the postie put the package down, I could hear an ominous rattle. Sure enough, as I picked it up, "rattle rattle rattle, popcorn sack". It turns out that they had just chucked the tips in and they were floating in the breeze....they were in their protective tubes, but still not something I would've done.

I noticed the box had already been opened and resealed, along with the inner plastic bag. I assume it was because the local distributor had upgraded the firmware to version 1.4 (it is 1.4 on start-up), though you'd think/hope in mid 2020 it would be current production.

Anyway, stuck in the 1/8" chisel tip. It powered up quickly and took on solder in a most encouraging manner, and also subsequently went into standby as it should.

First thing which seems odd is temperature adjust. 'Up' with left button and 'down' with right; I can't think of any other product that I've used that does that, though it's just something to get used to.

My first little play was a hack of my computer speakers. I dremelled the amp/passive crossover board as the amp had failed, and I plan to just use 'em as passives. Most of the brittle through hole speaker leads had come off at the board, so desolder, pull out the stubs, re-tin and resolder. Too easy! The desolder went O.K., but once there was sfa solder on the mask, the tip seemed unable to heat the stranded wire so I could pull it out. The same went for tinning the leads. I maxed it out, but still struggled. O.K., you asked for it....time to break out the big 13/64" chisel, and then we'll see what's what! The tip went in with a different feel to the other, and the display showed the dreaded 'CHP'. I was gutted. I have subsequently got it to energise about 30% of the time.

I got the shits with it and broke out the Weller, which finished the pissy little job tout de suite.

I made the decision to go with local distro rather than Paceworldwide to support aussie business, and the price was slightly cheaper. I had assumed that in June 2020, all the tip issues would have been resolved, worldwide stocks of the dodgy tips would've been recalled, and any control unit being sold would be current production. Poor old backwater Australia....

This is a really disappointing beginning, though I daresay I will sort it out with the distributor, but what? I keep sending tips back and forth to them until I luck onto a good one or they use up all their old stock?

I've thrown a tea towel over the unit (part of my kitchen bench is my workbench, haha!) 'cause I don't even want to look at it until I process this disappointment and formulate an email to the distributor.

Do you think in regards to the 1/8" tip, I may need to modify my technique to suit a modern tip? It took on solder beautifully, and as long as there was a pool on the traces, had no issues melting it. The tip was 'wet' but not 'blobby' when I was attempting to tin or remove the strands from the board holes, but unless I applied the solder direct to the tip not the work, I just got nowhere.

Sorry that my first post is a whinge,
Phil

[karamba]

Sorry to hear your predicament. I just got mine yesterday. There was no seal of any kind but the box obviously was never opened. They just make the packaging that it would be very difficult to open without leaving tracks.
I do not know how distributors work in Australia but I could not imagine that someone would go through the trouble of replacing the chips just to upgrade the version unless it was some kind of safety recall. So I would just call your distributor and ask about the open boxes.
About the tips: I do not think that rattling them around is very healthy either.

[Shock]

They were either putting in the 1.4 firmware or were checking it over before shipping. As far as I'm aware though there hasn't been any changes in the station. Pace did jump onto the tip problem straight away, may be a chance a few are still out there in the wild. But either way just get in contact with the distributor and they will sort it out.

If you need help with soldering let us know. The old Wellers do get quite hot, depending how to you approached things a smaller tip, no flux or not establishing a small thermal bridge before soldering may have made it more challenging.

[thm_w]

Anyway, stuck in the 1/8" chisel tip. It powered up quickly and took on solder in a most encouraging manner, and also subsequently went into standby as it should.
...
 I maxed it out, but still struggled. O.K., you asked for it....time to break out the big 13/64" chisel, and then we'll see what's what! The tip went in with a different feel to the other, and the display showed the dreaded 'CHP'. I was gutted. I have subsequently got it to energise about 30% of the time.

Were these the normal tips or the thicker "power" tips?
1/8 (3mm) is a fairly small tip so it could be hard to get a decent amount of power flowing through it with this type of station. 

Although this sounds like more of a flux/surface issue as mentioned above.

[tygersmoke]

Thanks for your responses. I will contact the distributor about the dud and keep my fingers crossed.

The Weller is a 50W analogue controlled unit, 0-100% scale, which was on "70%" to do the job with a 2mm tip, so should have been comfortably outgunned by the Pace.

Yeah, I guess I will add more solder to the tip prior to tinning, but it was only 20 gauge or so stranded copper. The 1/8" tip was not the beefier one, but I was still surprised that it was just unable to tin the wire until I had loaded up the tip with fresh solder.

Regards,
Phil

[pgo]

Hi,
You should also consider that the older Weller tips are usually intended for leaded solder and hence have a thinner plating.
The more recent Pace irons are meant to have a thicker iron(?) plating for unleaded solder.
I noticed a similar difference but maybe it's an unfair comparison of the tip plating rather than the irons.

[labjr]

Hi,
You should also consider that the older Weller tips are usually intended for leaded solder and hence have a thinner plating.
The more recent Pace irons are meant to have a thicker iron(?) plating for unleaded solder.
I noticed a similar difference but maybe it's an unfair comparison of the tip plating rather than the irons.

Regardless of tip plating, the Pace should beat the pants off of the Weller!

[Shock]

I just did a test and included some detail if you want to reproduce it. I used a couple of 1/8" (3.18mm) 1130 series tips. Tried different temps 320C, 350C and 370C (my presets on this station) with 63/37 rosin core solder.

Stripped some old cable (0.75mm ~20 gauge) without cutting back (normally I would expose fresh copper) cleaned my iron tip and placed a small fillet of solder on the tip face. Put the wire end to the tip and touched it with fresh solder to get a good thermal bridge. Waited a few seconds, soldered a little up the wire then back down from the insulation to prevent migration into the insulation, came out looking like a soldered wire.

Next I reflowed some large lead free soldered inductor pads on PCB. Cleaned the tip and touched a tiny amount of solder to the end, placed the tip to the edge of the pad waited a second and touched a little solder to the junction in bursts to establish reflow without loading down the tip temp. Then applied solder outwards around the pad until full reflow was established. Made some shitty lead free joints look a bit better.

Additional flux would have turned on easy mode in both cases and get the best results. The tip was slightly undersized for soldering the wire (it's just easier to do with a larger tip) but I think as long as you wait a couple of seconds to allow the wire to come to temp, no problems.

The tip was definitely undersized for the inductor pad, temperature and technique were important. If I were to remove the solder and redo the joint with fresh solder I wouldn't need external flux as the board was in good condition and clean. As long as a reasonable temp is being used and you are methodical even an undersize tip held in the right position can get good results you just need to use the solder wire flux to your advantage and wait a few secs for the heat to soak in.

Here is a before and after of the first pad I did. I wasn't trying for nice looking joints but the tip got hot and soldered.

[Shock]

Here are some examples of how flux makes a difference when soldering.
 

[tygersmoke]

Hello Shock,

Thanks for taking the time to do that and post the information, it's appreciated! Time for me to go back to school methinks, and I'll make use of that dremelled amplifier board to do it! I've likely been blundering along all these years with a blunt instrument, (not just me!) and now with a fine piece of equipment, this old dog needs to learn new tricks. It reminds me of a Choice magazine review of espresso machines where they praised the likes of ALDI and Sunbeam, but trashed the La Pavoni Europiccola as worst of the bunch. It is a real task to master it....do it wrong and you will have a truly disgusting espresso and it will sneeze the grounds all over your kitchen, but do it right and it creates a god shot.

And to top it all off, I set it up ready to email a photo to the distributor with the faulty tip in and the "CHP' on the display, and it is now working, say, 9 times out of 10. It still engages differently to the other tips; instead of the smooth docking, it does a kind of 'snick-click', hopefully not wearing anything out over time. I'm thinking that covering it with the tea towel for a few days gave it some good ju-ju.....

Thanks again.,
Phil

[Shock]

I'd be contacting the distributor and get another cartridge, not worth messing around with it.

[tygersmoke]

Yeah, I probably should; every time it 'snicks' into place, I'd be wincing a little.

By the way, I never realised that soldering flux for electronics was a thing; I have always relied on the rosin in the core of the solder. If I had ever seen separate flux, I would have assumed it's the stuff plumbers use! So a late journey begins....

[Cliff Matthews]

This area has more related Pace posts, so we moved the thread here today. I don't know if the Pace factory has ramped-up since the Covid shutdown, but I'll send them the new link so they'll drop-in on chats now and then 

Difficult year for many companies, stay safe everyone!

[dman777]

Hi,

I got my Pace ADS200 and was doing a test run. I didn't solder anything, I just plugged in a non performance tip and let it sit. I brought the temp down to 500. It would stay at 500 most of the time, but sometimes it would drop to 476 and then go back to 500 without me doing anything.
Also, while I was holding it outside the stand it would do the same drop occasionally(holding it but not soldering anything).

Is that normal?

BTW, really nice unit!

[totalnoob]

This area has more related Pace posts, so we moved the thread here today. I don't know if the Pace factory has ramped-up since the Covid shutdown, but I'll send them the new link so they'll drop-in on chats now and then 

Difficult year for many companies, stay safe everyone!
(Attachment Link)

Is she head of the Safety Department? 

[Shock]

I got my Pace ADS200 and was doing a test run. I didn't solder anything, I just plugged in a non performance tip and let it sit. I brought the temp down to 500. It would stay at 500 most of the time, but sometimes it would drop to 476 and then go back to 500 without me doing anything.
Also, while I was holding it outside the stand it would do the same drop occasionally(holding it but not soldering anything).

Likely the detected thermocouple temp, especially if a couple of heat cycles will warm that specific tip up at low temp. Though they improved this on firmware 1.4 from what I can tell the ADS200 tends to not smooth, average or hide the measurements as much as some other stations do.

An extreme opposite to this would be hiding all the temperature fluctuations from the user who would otherwise think their station has perfect performance/regulation during soldering and tip and thermocouple temps are always the same, in reality they are almost never the same.

Assuming you have checked obvious things like setback and minimum temp settings etc, you could probably test this by just causing that specific tip a slightly faster heat loss and see if the regulation kicks in. That is a low temperature for soldering though, and when a clean tip is loaded with solder or you create a solder bridge I expect the control led will flash amber to indicate it's going back to set temp. If it's green it means it's at set temp. If it's off it means it's the station is in setback or turned off.

If you are concerned however just contact Pace. Provide them as much detail as you can, just keep in mind that if the tip is loaded with solder the station may auto correct for variances as it seemingly does for different geometries. I don't know the special sauce so there may be something perfectly normal occurring in software.

[knotlogic]

I'm inching closer to picking up an ADS200, and I was going to ask for comments on my choice of tips, but I got slightly derailed.

I know Shock has mentioned the 1130-0012-P1 and 1130-0013-P1 chisel tips, but if I go to the Pace Worldwide website, navigate to All Products | Soldering Iron Tips, then use the drop down on the right to select TD-200 AccuDrive Tips, neither of these two tips show up.  They do show up if I specifically search for them.

Anyone know if there's a master list of tips that I can browse through?  I went through the above list of TD-200 Tips from above and have come up with this spreadsheet, sorting by shape and standard/performance.  Note that I haven't added the missing 1130-0012-P1 and 1130-0013-P1 yet.

Another minor nitpick about the website (sorry Aaron!), the product pages for the 1131-0001-P1 and 1131-0002-P1 appear to use photos of the standard tips as their main images.  The smaller thumbnail at the bottom seems to show the correct Ultra Performance one.

All that aside, does anyone know what the difference is between the 1130-0032-P1 Miniwave® (3.05mm) and the 1130-0049-P1 MINIWAVE® SPECIAL Tip?  My best guess is the bevel is 180 deg apart on the two.  And has anyone (Shock?) used the 1130-0050-P1 1/128" Conical Special (0.20mm)?  I'm interested in it as something to clean up QFN type packages after soldering by hand with paste and hot air.

[Shock]

Good work on the list.

As far as I'm aware "special" denotes a tip geometry requested by a customer, 1130-0049-P1 does look flipped but there could be other small differences. I don't have that specific tip as it was listed after I got the majority of my miniwaves.

You should be able to request a list and details direct from Pace. We only have the last list Aaron sent us on the forums here. If you do might pay to also include details about any anomalies you found with the website. There is a contact form on the website or use the support@paceworldwide.com address. If you get a current list feel free to share it here as an attachment as others will probably be interested.

Having a tip the same size as a pin or pad is not always the best solution for bridges as you can redistribute or reflow multiple pads with wider tips that have better heating. Small tips tend to work poorly with larger wick as you are heating the wick, pin, pad and pcb all at once.

So for this reason no one tip will work optimally in all situations. It's easier to have variety of sizes that will be dual purpose. My core set is odd sized chisels, one fine pointy, hook, knife and miniwaves for drag soldering. The only tips you probably won't use for bridges are the larger chisels but they are useful for high current traces, heatsinks and tinning etc. Otherwise all are good for removing or redistribute solder with a clean tip, flux and wick of an appropriate size and is a flexible set for soldering.