NSSD

[Leevibe]

New soldering station day!

You guys failed miserably at talking me out of buying the Hakko FX-888D soldering station. So far, I'm really impressed with it, although I feel like I've betrayed an old friend in replacing my fully functional Xytronic 379. I can't fully account for that part, but it definitely appears to be a step up. For one thing, the base unit is about half the total footprint and about twice the weight. I imagine that's the transformer. (The label on the hakko iron shows 65w at 26v, where the xytronic is 45w at 120v) The cable is about a foot longer, smaller diameter, and quite a bit more flexible. It's also detachable. I think there are other hakko irons that are compatible with this station. I like that it has temp presets too. There is a great selection of tips for these too, and the prices seem really reasonable, and everyone says that hakko tips are really good. The iron stand is metal and has a nice weight.

I had read enough reviews to know that the weakness of this iron is in the unintuitive 2-button control. It's especially bad in that you can inadvertently enter a calibration mode and totally screw it up. I just read and re-read the manual until I felt confident that I understood how to run it. It's honestly pretty simple to run. The weirdest thing so far is that my xytronic doesn't have any temp markings, only wattage markings for the dial, so I never really knew what temp I was soldering at. It will probably take a while for me to settle on a couple go-to temps. Right now I have 3 presets dialed in. One for low temp idling, just above 400F, one at 550F, and one at like 650F. I'll see how those work.


Here's what it looks like next to old faithful:







Here's a comparison of how much smaller the cable is compared to the xytronic.