(this is a resend to the list, the first was bounced by QTH.net because their postmaster has some brain-dead SMTP spam checking misconfiguration which produces false positives (for the subject line "Circuit Specialists 701 rework station:. Grrrrr.)
About a week ago, Tom Hammond pointed out that Circuit Specialists had some soldering stations which looked like Hakko 936's ( http://www.circuitspecialists.com/prod.itml/icOid/7307 ) for a good price. I noticed that they had a through hole rework station ( http://www.circuitspecialists.com/prod.itml/icOid/7789 ) which also looked very similar to a Hakko offering. There has been some conjecture that these are the same as the Hakko units, but are being sold by an OEM to Hakko for considerably less. Since my 20 year old Pace desoldering station recently died, I thought I'd try out one of these, especially since the $200 price was by far better than anything else available. This is about 20% of what a similar Hakko unit runs. I receive my station today, and can report that these are very obviously NOT the same as real Hakko products. They're Chinese clones. As mentioned earlier, these are made by Aoyue ( http://www.aoyue.com/english/index.htm ). From the looks of this unit, I doubt Aoyue OEMs anything to Hakko - some things are close, others are functional, but none are of the same quality. The desoldering handpiece is of decent quality. It appears that it will take Hakko spares, including heaters and tips. It could definitely use a better tip - this one is chrome (?) plated and won't "tin." The soldering pencil has a rubber grip instead of the heat insulating foam a real Hakko has, but is overall of decent quality. Both use multipin "microphone" style circular connectors, which is different than what Hakko uses. The station itself is workable, the electronics seem to do what they're supposed to (they regulate tip temperature and have an LED which lights when power is applied to the tip, so it blinks when the tip is at the set temp). The controls (switches and pots) are pretty cheap, I'll probably upgrade these. They silk screened "Circuit Specialists" on the front, but didn't bother with a Fahrenheit temperature scale. The manufacturer took time to grind the markings off the ICs on the circuit board (they copied Hakko, but don't want to be copied themselves, I guess), and no schematic is provided in the manual. The biggest obvious difference is that it uses a completely different vacuum pump than a real Hakko - meaning no ready source of spare parts. The pump actually works better than that on my old Pace. One strange thing though, is that the instruction manual (in pretty good Engrish [ http://www.engrish.com/ ]) clearly shows how to disassemble and clean a Hakko pump. The actual pump is completely different than that illustrated in the manual. All things considered, it works well. Time will tell how this unit holds up, but it seems to be a good deal. A couple of better quality switches and pots, some real Hakko desoldering tips, and a bit of time should take care of the minor issues. _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
