Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Upgrading to a Soldering Station

For some years now I have been using a cheap soldering iron with a 15W/30W switch that I purchased from Radio Shack (I miss them).  This has been just fine for the electric guitar modifications that I like to make, but I'm not comfortable using this iron for the Final Expansion 3 cartridge for my VIC-20.  I decided to purchase a soldering station with temperature control so I can tweak it while I'm doing my work.

Here is the station I bought on Amazon for about $30.

This is an AOYUE 469, which is a 60W iron.  It has a nice steel spring to keep the iron, which is much better than the cheap stamped stand I was using.  It has a place to put your spool of solder, and a place for a sponge (that's not a Post-it note!) to keep the iron tip clean.


Here you can see this does not let you specify a temperature.  The specifications provided state that the temperature is from 300F to 480F.  But, the dial goes to from 1 to 8 (not to 11)!


This is a photo of iron tip.  If you look carefully, it seems they have pre-tinned it for me.







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