The BLF GT70 "Giggle Monster" is here! 7,500lumens, 1,500m throw! Group buy Closed!

If I´ve to solder wires to a copper MCPCB, I try something like this:

Put the thermalpaste on the ground, put two pieces of metal (heat-resistant) on the ground and than the MCPCB on it.
So the heat isn´t pulled away too fast any longer.

After soldering you can remove the small pieces of metal and press the MCPCB down and rotate it a little bit to evenly sread the thermal paste.

Yes yes., I use a light meter app…

I’ve found my 80W Yihua 995D soldering station can’t unsolder certain mcpcb leads (30mm copper). The 995D would melt the top part of the solder blob then the whole head of the flashlight would get hotter and hotter.

Then I tried my cheap Velleman 50W and it can melt it very easily and quickly without heating up the whole head.

It’s theorized, and it seems plausible, that it’s the somewhat loose fit of the tip onto the heating element that is not allowing good heat transfer. It’s said that the genuine Hakko tips have a tighter fit to the heating element and is one if the reasons they perform so well. I’ll try to test this theory soon.

And now you know why I’m T-18 that is my go to solder tips always, Hakko solder tips are the only ones I ever use, the best IMO…

I had that same problem when using the china tips, ever since switching to the hakko tips I can solder mcpcb’s mounted to a light with good thermal paste without an issue as long as the substrate has enough thermal resistance. The clemance mcpcb’s are hard to solder no matter what for example.

I used to think my station was the issue until I also switched to hakko tips, now even my cheap $15 soldering iron works great and I find myself using it a fair amount, I keep a large tip on 1 of them and a small on the other.

Same here TA, this has to be one of the first things I discovered after joining, I have a Yihua 936 and started with some sort of knock off tips and then Richard RMM and I were chatting and I explained some issues I was having so actually it was RMM that clued me offhandedly by telling me he never has the problems I was referring to and I asked what tips he preferred and it’s the T18 series and so my thinking is if it’s good for RMM then it will be excellent for me and it’s stayed that way.
I found that the Shape B became my do everything and anything tip, and just as a thought this tip is probably the best for anyone new to soldering, I think you can hardly fail with this tip, worth looking at even if your an old hand at soldering but haven’t tried these.
Shape B and examples

I can’t get any coupons to work, tried different browsers, copy/paste and manually entering codes. :frowning:

Very strange, even typing them in manually did not work?

It just takes the price off, you have to look at the total to see the difference.

About the Hakko tips, where would be a good place to buy one single genuine tip at a decent price?

If you use amazon prime I think they have decent prices on them there. Otherwise ebay is where I got mine.

Sorry, my mistake. On my device the Determine order button wasn’t onscreen until I scrolled. There wasn’t any Enter button near the coupon field so I hit Enter and it moved to a page with only the checkout option.

No problem, I figured it was something like this.

The T-18 S3P is the one you want for the big stuff…NOT CHEAP….

https://www.amazon.com/Hakko-T18S3P-Fx-888-Station-5-2mm/dp/B00762AHTE/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=lawn-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1537309289&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=Hakko+T-18+S3

I got the D24 with the Hakko station and I liked it alot, still do… then I tried the S3,D32 and D16, but then I found this kit… with the S3 D32 D24….Amazon.com Pretty good deal and you get the 2 Conical tips for like free…

Yes, since others ordered successfully I thought I must be doing something wrong but I just couldn’t see what it was. :person_facepalming:

That is a nice deal. I think I’ll get this kit.

Can anyone comment on the diameter of their heating element? I want to make sure my element is not undersized. I got about 3.86mm on mine and 4.21mm on the tip ID. That’s a 0.35mm gap.

I made a video showing the gap.

Heating element Diameter is 3.86mm x 21.73mm long and the Barrel/Nut is 44.58

Okay, the heater element diameters seem like a perfect match. So if the Hakko tip has a nice snug fit, it will probably work fine on my iron.

If you want to see another reason why these cheap tips can’t transfer heat, check out this crap. :open_mouth:

Any idea of NW conversion ship dates?

Hmmm, I’ll look into it, but I’ve got this (Soldering Station 2005 - Magnum Products) together with Magnum points and I always thought it was a quality product. Is it not?