Not that this helps you personally, but I thought it’s an interesting fact:
In Sofia, Bulgaria, there is a company called KASI. They are Bulgaria’s only official distributor of Hakko, Balver Zinn, Bondline and other brands.
In their store they have a show room where they have pretty much everything set up and displayed so you can check it out. I am not sure what’s their policy about actually trying out the soldering stations (My guess is that it’s probably allowed) as I haven’t had the need to go there. Even though I live in the same city, I just order from them online.
When you are uncertain of which station to get, they even tell you about the showroom and invite you to check things out.
[quote=“coflynn, post:18, topic:3673, full:true”]
What JBC model do you have anyway? I’m curious to try the difference in person…
[/quote] @jpnorair
I’m way late to this discussion but I just recently took a JBC NASE-1C for a one month demo. It is a dual station, one very fine tip iron and one tweezers also with fine tip.
Simply put, I will not be returning the demo and will buy the unit.
I have typically used metcal but never had luck with the fine tips. The barrel part of the cartridge is still too big and it just doesn’t seem like the bery tip gets hot enough.
JBC is great for this, even though the tip is super tiny, it still gets hot.
With the tweezer, I had historically not been a fan of my metcal tweezers because of size and also the uneven temp between the two sides.
The cool thing about the JBC is that it comes with a foot pedal. So you can approach the part with a cold tweezers, got it on the component and the hit to foot pedal to remove. Super convenient for swapping out 0201 passive. For this reason alone it is worth the price. (If you need to do this kind of work)
Foot pedal is a nice, low-tech, solid idea. My older Weller stations had magnetic switches in the handpieces which worked great, but my newer, fancier Weller station has motion switches that don’t work for sh*t.
I’ve used many over the years. The most basic unit works extremely well and is about $500 all in. Then there’s the nano soldering unit, which has dual pencils, which is more expensive, like $1700 all in. I’ve also used fully loaded rework systems that are very expensive.
The best value by far is the basic station. Tip changes are fast. The nano station is very nice, but for the extra money I’m not sure I’d buy it unless I expected to do a lot more soldering than I do anymore. The fully loaded rework system is only for thinking about if you’re spending other peoples money.
Most of the soldering I do is with hot air these days. At home I have a $300 Quick station that replaced a broken Hakko. Honestly, it suits my needs as well as I could expect. But the JBC basic station is awesome when I need it. As I consult and work a full time right now, at the office lab there’s the JBC nano station, and it’s great.
Yes. I have a thing called an iExtruder, which is extremely convenient for depositing solder paste. I forgot to mention that
That said, I don’t do much 0805. The vast majority of parts for me, these days, are 0402, 0201, and little chip scale packages with balls. Occasional QFNs. Once in awhile, an 0603 or 0805 part for a DC-DC converter.
I have Hakko and Weller at work and I don’t rate them. I was really disappointed I didn’t like the Hakko. They are OK for single component jobs, or making up plugs etc. The modern weller certainly wasn’t worth the extra over the Hakko. In fact the most popular soldering iron at work is a very basic weller from the 1980’s.
At home I have a Pace MBT250. It’s not fast to heat up, and takes up a lot of valuable bench space, but there is nothing I can’t do with it, and I love the desoldering tool for repair work. I picked it up brand new on eBay for a bargain price and have never looked back. I used to use a Xytronix (sp?) that was good but had limited tips.
The dremel seems to be the best of a bad bunch as far as gas soldering irons go. I used to like the weller gas irons but had a couple of poor ones.
I haven’t used one in a while, but several employers back I used a Hakko 951 for small scale production work. Love that station. I’ve used Metcal, Weller, and JBC, and this one is my favorite. It just seems to have the power and control you want, right when you need it. I might be a little biased because the Hakko rep introduced me to the hoof tip, which I had never considered before. It’s now my favorite tip for about 90%of soldering applications.
The FX-951 is a decent iron. Its weakness when compared to the fancier ones (e.g. JBC) is that it cannot as easily dump gross amounts of heat. This becomes important if you are working with direct connections to ground planes – thermal relief on pins is inadvisable in RF and high-speed.
I have an FX-951 at home, but I am thinking about replacing it with one of these JBC compact stations (see below). It is double the price of a 951, but in this case I actually think it is more than twice as good. That is almost never the case – usually with expensive tools you are chasing marginal added value.
To give an example of marginal added value per cost, the JBC station I really want is the Nano Rework Station. There’s one at the office lab. To be honest, I’ve never loved rework tweezers, but I do love the Nano pencils and tips, and these are unique to this $1600 station. Even so, it’s basically impossible to justify the $1000 premium.
I replaced the Hakko FX-951 I have at home with the compact JBC station. I’m really happy with my decision so far. I think the JBC performs much better in terms of heat delivery. I can’t remember the numbers off the top of my head, but the Watts at the tip was WAY higher. I also find the pencils to be much more maneuverable.
OH MY! Thread derailer… i-Extruder. How well does it really work for you? Can it do really small pads for a CSP BGA? Watched Dave’s first look of it but this might be a good alternate to screens which can be hard to use and clean up for smaller boards.
FWIW - I mostly do CSP with flux-only soldering. I have success with this on both ENIG & HASL finish boards. If doing a HASL boards this sounds in some ways similar to this strategy!
Yes, this is my current strategy as well (unless I have StencilQuiks available as they are more reliable). But if it could do that minute of an application, then it could probably do anything. I am also not talking about large packages as I avoid via-in-pad applications. But there are some smaller parts with creative CSP BGA packages out there that don’t require via-in-pad.
If you can afford a Metcal, get one. It’s in a different league. The heating capacity is just insane. I have one at work and it’s my goto iron. Keep in mind that you’ll also want some different tips.
The JBC tools are also great. I would get a Metcal over it, but JBC might be better if you want a large setup. I love how the stands keep the cables off the table and they heat quickly.
These are all expensive options. My home bench is space constrained, so there I have a Yihua 899d. Very compact with good iron and hot air built in. Reasonable price and you can get some extra tools for your budget, such as an MHP30 http://www.miniware.com.cn/product/mhp30-mini-hot-plate-preheater/ that will do wonders for any job requiring a lot of heat. And it’s tiny!
Hakko != Metcal.
A Hakko is on par with a Weller in terms of quality. They are not innovative by any means, but they are great tools that last long. My first soldering iron was a Weller I had for 5+ years. It’s since been used in a local hackerspace for another 8 years and still has the original tip thanks to never using a wet sponge, but rather using copper curls to clean.
At work we have the Metcal MX52xx https://store.metcal.com/en-us/shop/soldering-desoldering/soldering-desoldering-systems/mx-series/ with tweezers and a handpiece. We also have hot air from Metcal. This setup is about $1500 new, but we got it from a prototyping workshop that went bankrupt. We have 8-9 tips for it and that also adds to the cost. 2 seconds heat up time and it can melt anything the second you touch it.
