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Soldering irons with temp control beat my old pencil iron every single time
Back when I started fixing laptops in a little shop on Vine Street in 2009, I used a cheap fixed wattage pencil iron for everything and cooked more pads than I care to admit. A guy I worked with handed me a Hakko FX-888 with real temp control around 2012 and suddenly I could hit 350C on a ground plane without lifting a trace. The difference was night and day, mostly because I could actually see the number instead of guessing by how long it took to melt solder. Anyone still running a pencil iron on board level work, or did you all make the jump and never look back?
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allen.charlie20d ago
My buddy Dave at the shop on Vine kept swearing by his old RadioShack pencil until he torched a MacBook charging port in 2013 and had to eat the cost of the board. Bought a used Weller with a dial the next week and never fried anything again.
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