291–300 of 415 posts
Soldering is one of those things where the tools you use have a direct impact on the quality and enjoyment of the work. Shitty $20 soldering irons from Home Depot not only produce awful results but they are incredibly frustrating. I’m pretty sure most people who think they suck at soldering and hate it only feel that way because their tool sucks. A good quality soldering iron and high quality, thin solder make a huge…
Soldering is one of those things where the tools you use have a direct impact on the quality and enjoyment of the work. Shitty $20 soldering irons from Home Depot not only produce awful results but they are incredibly frustrating. I’m pretty sure most people who think they suck at soldering and hate it only feel that way because their tool sucks. A good quality soldering iron and high quality, thin solder make a huge…
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Be interesting to see how this stacks up to a good entry level iron like the Hakko FX-888DX. https://hakkousa.com/fx-888dx.html
I can guarantee it is leagues better. Frankly, I won't solder anymore unless it is with a direct-heat iron. They heat up instantly, cool down quickly, provide far better thermal transfer, and are much more comfortable to hold. Don't brush off what I'm saying before you try a direct-heat iron (Hakko sells them, Pace does, and JBC is the gold standard). They are usually expensive from the big names, but even a Pinecil…
I don't even know when I last soldered and that's still tempting at a deep-seated nerd level.
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Do you have plans to have an actual local application to do this? Chrome-only web tools are not sustainable and a deal breaker.
This is something I'm wondering about, because yeah - my ability to change the iron temperature (if not using the battery) shouldn't depend on iFixit's servers being online. I would at least hope that they document the protocol so that other people can write local applications to do it if not.
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Do you cook? There are dozens of obvious examples. A crappy knife will tear instead of cut. You'll ruin tomatoes, have uneven dices, crush and smear delicate herbs, have ripped apart meat and fish that you'll destroy more trying to get rid of the trim. That's not counting the downtime you'll have when the knife slips instead of cuts and you can't cook at all due to injury. Giving an expensive knife to a new cook that…
I cook, and I disagree with the assertion that a better knife makes you a better cook. Good knives are useful, but ultimately you're still going to produce crappy results if you're a bad cook with a good knife.
A better cook knows that if her knives are dull, she won’t perform as well.
Soldering is one of those things where the tools you use have a direct impact on the quality and enjoyment of the work. Shitty $20 soldering irons from Home Depot not only produce awful results but they are incredibly frustrating. I’m pretty sure most people who think they suck at soldering and hate it only feel that way because their tool sucks. A good quality soldering iron and high quality, thin solder make a huge…
I don't let my daughter date anyone that can solder (or carnival workers or clowns).
Meh. Seriously. Pros: 1. "Portable, sorta" 2. Reasonably high-power 3. Has an accelerometer (as does everything else in its class) 4. "Repairable" Cons: 1. No Hall effect sensor to detect when iron is placed in holder 2. A walled single-source garden of soldering tips that doesn't even exist yet instead of using commodity COTS parts 3. The fucking temperature control is fucking paywalled behind a proprietary USB powe…
We considered having a sensor to detect when the cap is installed, but found that the accelerometer met that need. The default sleep timer is 30 seconds, but I set mine to 5 seconds and it works great. All of the settings, including the temperature setting, are available in the web interface for free. The settings persist permanently on the iron so you can use it with any USB-C PD power source that you've already got…
> The accelerometer detects when you pick it up and heats it back up. I don't want this. I would rather push a button and wait for a light to turn on. Automatic off, fine, I guess, though I don't love it and would never want to rely on it. Automatic on, no way.
I have something like this on a TS100 and it works fine. You set it down for a while because you're still soldering but you need to move stuff and it reduces the heat. Then you pick it back up and by the time you've gotten to part it's already back up the temp. How is that worse than it just being full temp the whole time?
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Agree. It's kind of like a chef's knife: a better tool makes you a better chef. A sharp knife is also quite a bit safer than a dull knife. By heating to operating temperature in 5 seconds and rapidly pouring heat into the material, you don't have to hold the hot iron as long. As soon as you're done, pop on the safety cap and instantly shield the hot metal. Soldering isn't remotely mainstream, and part of that is the…
For all edge tools be they for cooking, woodworking, forestry or something else: buy steel, not sharp. Henkels, Lie-Nielsen, Gransfors Bruk, Victorinox, or Stanley is only going to sharpen it for you once. Corollary: learn to sharpen. The best steel in the world isn't going to cut anything if it's dull. For the record, I sharpen chisels almost daily and I hate sharpening kitchen knives. The carbides set at the right…
They'll take their knives to these services and pay $5 or $6 per knife, and it will get done to perfection in just a few minutes while they wait. You can use these same services, there is no membership card needed to get in the door.
I'm going to go ahead and sling mud at iFixit for using a Battery pack instead of individual cells and springs. It also doesn't seem that this expensive power supply supports power pass-through. A soldering iron shouldn't have a shelf life. Easily replaceable commodity batteries with spring terminals are massively superior to packs. What a gross product that makes me think significantly less of iFixit. They seem to h…
I agree with you. We wanted to use individual 18650 cells so badly ! We designed the whole thing that way. We did exactly what you proposed, and built cell balancing circuitry and code. It worked great! Then we went to the safety certification bodies and they said, absolutely not, there is no way you can sell that. We tried so many avenues to persuade them, from proposing 18650s with built-in safety circuitry to show…
Of course, a pack of 6x MJ1 is relatively trial to built (except it'd require some decent plastic body)- esp for 2s/3p, still not very useful aside running that particular iron/tool (and most likely end up charging it w/ the power supply...)
