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(Fake?) Hakko FG-100

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FG-100I recently had my Hakko FR-300 repaired due to a bad heating element, and while I was looking at doing it myself, they mentioned calibration after replacing the element. So, I started looking for how much a soldering tip calibrator would cost (since many thermal probes won’t measure that high). Turned out, there are a ton of fake/grey market Hakko calibrators on eBay for less than $15 shipped from China ((I find the economics of buying stuff cheap from China hard to fathom… How does someone selling this stuff make any money once you factor shipping, etc)). Anyway, I bought one, and waited.

The unit arrived a couple weeks later ((shipped a bit late due to Chinese New Year)), and I must say, it is the most amazing fake I’ve ever seen. The box looked legit (included serial number), the packaging inside looked legit, and the unit itself looks identical to the real thing. The biggest take away is the “Made in Japan” on the back of the unit… which, isn’t very believable. I don’t want to take it apart to look at the soldering (since there’s some spring mechanism involved), but I’d imagine it’s scary. Anyway, the unit is extremely easy to use. You throw a sensor on it (mine came with 10), and then fire up an iron, wet the tip with solder, and place the tip on the sensor “middle”. My recently repaired/calibrated FR-300 read 401C when set to 400C. Cool (the unit claims accuracy of ±3C, and the FR-300 was calibrated to ±10F (approx. ±5C)). So then I tried my Hakko 936 (old and trusty)… setting to 375C resulted in only reading 320! Holy crap, my go to iron was over 50C low, no wonder reworking some joints seemed troublesome. According to the 936 manual, you’re supposed to calibrate at 400C. Turned to that, it remained over 50C off. Luckily, calibration is easy (small phillips screw trimpot under the main knob), and relatively quickly I had it registering correctly.

Final test was my Weller WTCPT tip controlled unit. It SHOULD always be maintain an accurate temperature. I fired it up with a 700F tip installed, and after a couple minutes, checked, and it showed 376C, or 708.8F, which is within spec since the tips are ±9F rated. It did cycle a bit on and off, but well within ±15F, which is fine with me.

While I wish I couple buy a real (or at least legit) Hakko FG-100, I don’t see myself calibrating my irons regularly and only have the two that can be calibrated anyway. =) For less than $15, I’d HIGHLY recommend one. Especially if you don’t know how accurate your iron is.

[xrr rating=4.5/5]

Hakko FR-300 Review

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FR300-05I often find myself repairing electronics that have blown caps, or bad switches, or worse, a bad IC that has 14 to 28 legs. Caps you can cheat and heat one leg, then the other, and work them out (this can be risky, as you risk lifting a pad), and ICs you can cut all the legs and then remove the legs one at a time, but this always felt… desperate. So, when I had the chance to buy a desoldering gun, I jumped on the Hakko FR-300. It replaces the oldy but goody Hakko 808 that people often complained about a short power cord, and other small things. Anyway, Hakko seems to addressed all of these with the FR-300, as it is… awesome.

Since purchasing the unit, I’ve done several cap replacements, and most significantly, removal of 34 tactile switches from my Racal-Dana 1992. With a solder sucker, or solder-wick, this would have taken an hour, easily, to do. With the Hakko FR-300, it took 10 minutes, tops. If I did charged for work, the 50 minute time savings would add up very quickly to the $240 price tag of the Hakko.

Warm-up on the unit is very quick, and cleaning is also extremely easy (though I did get a broken off pin wedged in the tip one time, and dislodging it required heating the gun up to maximum to melt all the solder that had collected around it, and using the cleaning tool to push it out. Routine cleaning is very easy, as it “loads” a bit like a real gun. You pull back a “chamber” and remove the cartridge and knock it out. Then replace.

The Hakko FR-300 desoldering gun may be my most favorite tool in my arsenal after a soldering iron. My ONLY complaint about the unit is really the price of tips. At a little over $20 each, it does become a tad expensive to have all of them, but with the stock 1.0mm, and the 1.6mm tip, I’ve been able to tackle just about any through hole component I’ve had to replace.

[xrr rating=5/5]

Update 1: My Hakko wouldn’t heat up one day, and after troubleshooting and finding the element “open circuit”, I contacted Hakko. They quickly issued me a shipping label, and I sent the unit in. They repaired under warranty, and sent it back. Total time I didn’t have the unit was a little over a week. Interestingly, after getting it back, it heats WAY faster (takes maybe 20 seconds to heat up, vs the 45-60 seconds before). Cool!

Update 2: I used the unit a lot to do the button replacement on my Racal-Dana 1992 last night, and noticed I was getting little puffs of smoke exiting the unit around the chamber and back. I contacted them about this, and they indicated this shouldn’t be happening, but rather than having me send the unit back in for repair, they’re sending me a whole new FR-300, and then I can send the old one back for them to diagnose. Awesome! Well done Hakko!

Racal-Dana 1992 Button Repair

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racal-dana-1992-frequency-counterLike nearly ever other Racal-Dana 199x owner, I have the mushy/lifeless buttons, so this last week (during vacation) I decided to do the replacement work. It involved unsoldering all the stock buttons (34 of them). Thankfully I have a Hakko FR-300 desoldering gun that made very quick work of removing the buttons ((note: you’ll need the N50-06 tip to fit around one of the lugs on the buttons, which for some reason have one small, and one large lug)). Took maybe 5-10 minutes to remove all the original buttons. The replacements I used were Panasonic EVQ-21509K switches. The only issue with these is the hole spacing on the board is not “standard” so you have to work at placement to get them lined up. Some others have purchased 4-contact switches on ebay, and cut two corner legs off, and then installed the switch angled 45°. In hind sight, this may have been easier since I had to tweak things a bit to get all the switches lined up.

The real bear of the install was modifying the key caps to fit the new buttons. The original buttons have a cross top that fits into the buttons, and holds them on via simple friction. The new buttons, however, are standard cylindrical actuators. Modifying them required some side cutters (which anyone in electronics will have), and needle nose pliers to twist out the cut pieces. The worst part is on your fingers, as holding the buttons gets pretty painful over the 34 of them… but after an hour or so of work, I had them all done, and waiting to be glued. Then the realization hit me. Because of the weird leads on the Panasonic switches, they didn’t sit flat against the PCB, so the switch stems weren’t perfectly upright, and therefore the key-caps didn’t sit in the holes right. Damn it.

So, admitting defeat, I ordered some cheap 4 contact switches on ebay (6x6x9mm, same as the Panasonic’s), and removed all the panasonic switches (again, thank god Hakko FR-300). 3 weeks later, the eBay switches arrived, and after removing two corner legs, the new switches sit much better, albeit, diagonally (who cares). The legs did have to be bent a tiny amount, but the biggest issue was really just pressing the button against the PCB while soldering it in place. Total time to install all the new buttons took about an hour. Clearing out the inner part of the button caps took a bit longer, and gluing them in place was a bit of a pain, but wasn’t terrible. And really, having working buttons made all of it well worth while. Good luck!