Soldering Station Opinions / Advice

[Anonymous]

A little background…I have been using a Weller WES51 for about 20 years.  It has been perfect for my needs.  Aside from the LED indicating that the iron has reached the set temperature being a little wonky, nothing is wrong with it.  It has performed flawlessly while building 200+ pedals.  I have recently been down a Eurorack rabbit hole and have run out of through-hole modules to build and I am about to start building some SMD boards.  Being lazy, I was going to buy a new PES51 pencil so I could have it setup with a fine tip for doing the SMD and leave my normal tip on my other iron so I am not constantly swapping out tips.  Anyway, with the new PES51 running $50+ and my current station being 20+ years old I considered just buying a second soldering station to do my SMD work and to have as a backup.  Since the Weller has served me well I wanted to continue to support them.  But, out of all the reviews that I have read, the current Weller models don’t seem to rate very well.  The Hakko FX888D is on a lot of “best of” lists.

So, for all of the you hardcore pedal builders, what soldering station do you use?  What do you recommend?  A lot of the reviews mentioned long times to reach temp with the new Wellers.  My current iron heats up pretty darn quick…it is ready to go in the time it takes to walk and get a beer out of the fridge!

I am wanting to stay with a normal soldering iron…not looking to go into the hot air stations.  Most of the stuff I will be building will be 0805 so not unworkable with a normal iron.

I am also wondering if I am looking in the wrong price range for a comparable soldering station.  Most of the ones I am looking at are around $100…that is less than what I paid for the WES51 20+ years ago.  Of course I would like to spend as little as possible but if there is a big jump in quality going up to something in the $200+ range I am in for that.

Anyway, any experience / advice / recommendations are greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Brooks

 

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