TIL those $60 desoldering guns with the built-in pump actually work better than my $180 station after 8 years of fighting with it

Swapped to one last week just to see what the hype was about and it cleared a 40-pin connector in under 3 minutes, something I used to spend 20 minutes on with my old rig, so has anyone else had a tool they ignored for years that ended up being a game changer?

3 comments

3 Comments

derekward12d ago

Three minutes for a 40-pin connector is genuinely impressive, I'm still mad about all those wasted evenings.

alicew6821d ago

Yeah @jennifer965 I'm not so sure. People hype these things up but half the time it's just the honeymoon phase. Give it a month and you'll probably find some annoying flaw nobody mentioned.

jennifer96521d ago

Picked up a cheap hot air rework station last year after using a soldering iron and wick for 15 years. Thought it would be junk but it popped off a dead USB port in maybe two minutes flat. Same job used to take me ten minutes of careful wick work and I'd still lift pads sometimes. Now I reach for it for almost everything. Makes me wonder what other basic tools I've been snubbing.