The soldering station in the photo below (JBC DI 3000) has provided me with many years of good service! I’ve regularly used it for perhaps a decade, and I purchased it fairly cheap in used state, so it’s had a long life. It has been a pleasure using it. It was pretty high-end when released, and it can operate with several different types of tools; I use it with two different-sized soldering iron handles, and I have soldering tips ranging from a tiny 0.2mm in size, to maybe 4mm, so I can use the same soldering station for surface-mount parts, but also for large connectors.
However, for the past few weeks, it has been playing up. The iron's temperature has rapidly fluctuated for no reason, and it’s proved to be very difficult to solder as I used to.
I was a bit depressed about that! I didn’t want to shell out many hundreds on a new soldering station. I decided to take it apart to see if I could do anything to fix it.
Amusingly, as soon as I took it apart, I realized that there was absolutely no need to fix it! The soldering station has two channels. I have always used the first channel (just manually swapping out the two irons), and the second channel had a good chance of functioning. I plugged the iron into that second channel, and all was well!
I took some photos of the internals anyway, while it was apart.
As you can see in the photo above, the soldering station has a separate control unit and soldering iron stand. You can plug in a second soldering iron stand, although I’ve only had one. It’s a very convenient system because the control unit can be placed away from the desk so that the only space consumed on the work desk is for the soldering stand.
It’s a nice system, it auto-detects when the iron is in its stand, and immediately reduces the power to the tip. I also like that the iron handle is connected to the ground around the (always cold) metal collar where the tip is attached so that the user can frequently touch that during use, to dissipate any static charge (obviously, it doesn't replace a wrist strap).
There are three heavy-duty screws securing the base of the control unit. With those removed, I could pull out the base (which houses the transformer), and the rear panel (which has the mains connector, and the two circular connectors for attaching the two stands. As mentioned above, I only used one of the connectors since I only have one stand.
The rear panel has a banana socket for grounding a work mat. There is also a small fan (which I like because it’s quiet but provides a minimal sound always to remind me when the iron is on!
Here’s the other side of the rear panel. All looks fairly normal!
The transformer has a clearly separated primary coil. The secondary side has two windings; the lower current winding powers the microcontroller.
Here’s the interesting part! (Click to enlarge the image for more detail) It looks nicely constructed. The top and bottom components are fairly symmetrical since the unit supports two channels.
The other side has many discrete, a couple of op-amps and analog switch ICs, and the LCD screen.
I happened to have a spare op-amp (it is OP07C), so while I had the unit open, I removed the old one and soldered it in (using an earthed, portable soldering iron Yet Another C210 Compatible Soldering Iron: KSGER C210 Portable ), in the hope that perhaps the old op-amp was faulty. It didn’t make a difference : (
If you have suggestions for what might have gone wrong, it would be great to hear your ideas! I may open up the unit again in the future to fix the first channel, but for now, I’m hoping the second channel can continue to work for as long as possible!
I suppose there are (at least) two morals to the story. One is that it's really useful to have a spare soldering iron. The KSGER C210 iron is cheap enough to keep as a spare, but it has great performance, too. The second lesson is that even if only one soldering tool will ever be used, it's really great for redundancy to have a multi-channel soldering station.
Thanks for reading!
