jpowcode

A hot air rework station was something I'd wanted for a while, but not something I wanted to pay hundreds of pounds for initially until I'd seen how much use they got. I picked up one of these cheap Chinese models from Ebay after seeing it reviewed on the EEV Blog. There are lots of different ones on Ebay with various different logos, but they all look like exactly the same model. I was a bit concerned by some of the comments on the EEV forum about them not being wired safely, but given how cheap they were I'd thought I'd take the risk and take it apart before using it to check he wiring myself. On inspection it looks to be ok. The mains is wired ok and the earth is all connected up as it should be. The circuit board is all trough-hole component and looks like it hasn't had that much care with wonky heat-sinks and transistors and blobs of glue squirted in abundance around the cable entry point.  Having said that the solder joints are ok, there's heat shrink around the switch contacts and the cables are neatly tied together. All in all for the money I'm pleased. I'll see how it works in practice and report back.

Update

I've now used this a few times to desolder some surface mount chips and it worked pretty well. The only small gripe I have is how long it takes to cool down when replaced on the stand. This wouldn't be a problem apart from the fact that it does this with the fan still running and my desk is quite close to the curtains. Bit of a fire risk maybe? It turns it off when it's sufficiently cool.