exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

And another recommendation: The Desoldering Station ZD-915.
I bought mine from Amazon for around 80 EUR, which is surprisingly cheap considering what you get. It's an 80W desoldering iron with vacuum pump in the base unit. The handle is a nice pistol grip with good trigger. The base unit is made of metal and quite heavy, the handle is made of some plastic, but seems good quality. The unit comes with some soldering nozzles, cleaning wires and filters. There is a transparent acrylic tube in the handle, where the soldering tin is collected, two filters protect the pump in the base.

I desoldered a couple of ICs and through hole components with it, it works really well. Even bigger components with large copper areas around them are quickly desoldered. You still have to be careful, but it is a huge improvement in my opinion.

The base unit has a cooling fan, that starts up as soon as the unit is turned on. It's quite loud, at least for using it at home. But since you don't have it switched on all the time, this is not really an issue, at least not for me. And I guess you could always replace it with a silent one.

On youtube you can find several tests of this unit, here is one example:



Overall I can highly recommend this, especially for its very low price.

Small addition: If you are hearing a clicking noise every couple of minutes and see the display flashing, you might have an issue with the power cable.

The unit comes with a standard power cable with a C13 plug. Apparently these are wired wrongly, so that neutral and live is swapped. The internal power switch separates what should be live, but in reality is neutral. This leads to power leaking into the caps and discharging into the display.

This is a common issue in Germany, since our power plugs don't have a defined polarity. It only depends on the direction of the plug in the socket, whether you have live or neutral on one particular side. So in my case it only means, I have to turn the plug 180° to solve that problem.

But if you live somewhere else, you will need to swap the cable to a correctly wired one, to get rid of that. Or have another mains switch, that safely interrupts all lines

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