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Spent 3 weeks reflowing the same cold joint on my TV before realizing my $8 soldering iron tip was the problem
I kept redoing the same HDMI port on my garage TV, and after the fourth time it still flickered, I finally put a multimeter on the iron tip and saw it was hitting 180C instead of the 370C it claimed, so I want to know what cheap irons actually hold their temp or if I should just go buy a Hakko like everyone keeps telling me.
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jason_fisher422d ago
Check the actual tip size and shape first before you blame the iron brand. A lot of these cheap pencil tips have almost no thermal mass, so the second it touches a big ground plane on an HDMI shield it dumps all its heat and never catches back up, even if the iron reads fine when it's just sitting there. Your multimeter test was smart but it only tells you what the tip does at rest, not what it does under load. Put a drop of solder on the tip and watch the temp with a thermocouple while you actually feed solder into a joint, and you'll see the real story. Half the guys buying Hakkos never needed one, they just needed a fat chisel tip and a station that can push watts back into the tip fast.
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