[Mike Rivers]

On Feb 3, 2:25 pm, "G-Dawg" wrote:

Been wondering about this myself. Been looking at the Weller solder
stations, nice but expensive. I believe they are the "standard".

Weller is one of the old time and consistently good makers of
soldering equipment. Hakko is another. They make temperature
controlled models that pump more juice into the heating element when
you put the tip on something that sucks the heat away. This is
important for working on modern circuit boards. For point-to-point
wiring such as on older instrument amplifiers, you can get away with a
fixed-wattage heating element around 50 watts or so.

I'd be suspicious of something you find from a faceless eBay seller
that claimes to be "same as Weller" and sells for half as much. It's
possible to make a bad soldering iron with which you won't be able to
make good joints.

What I'm wondering is, they have temperature settings... What temp is what?
I've always gone by iron wattage for soldering work.

350C is about right for most routine work. If you're using lead-free
solder, that requires a higher temperature.

Looking at fluke meters... Need to go to 1000 volts DC I
guess, which equals $2-300 dollars. Ouch!

Yeah, but it's a lifetime investment.