The ceramic element heats up in half the time as other soldering stations (about 5 seconds instead of 10) It also recovers almost instantly after you clean the tip on the wet sponge. I find other stations sometimes require a few seconds to get back to temperature.

If you are forgetful like me, and leave it on over the weekend, when you come back to it Monday morning, it hasn’t burnt itself out, it still works!

Personally, I don’t find the tips to be quite as good as a Weller tip, but everything else about the Hakko is so much better, it’s worth the switch.

I second this recommendation.

Butane irons are cheap ($25 USD), truly portable and can be as hot as you want. They can also double as torches to do large-scale reflow world.

Downsides are there, of course: you can easily ignite your work area, it’s hard to keep the heat steady until you learn your iron and when you’re using them as a torch to reflow you can singe your work.

Still, for me, I prefer them.

I’ve never heard of the sponges outright damaging a soldering tip, though.

At the office, there’s a Metcal that puts the Hakko to shame. It uses RF to heat the element. Gets hot in a few seconds and makes more heat when needed. But the Metcal has no heat control – you buy a tip rated to run at a certain temperature.

It’s not as nice as a JBC irons ($600 for those, however), with the quick-change tips.

Can anybody compare the Hakko to a high-end Weller? I pulled my variable-temp/temp-controlled WES-50 from a trash can, but I’ve had it forever and it’s still going strong.

The Aoyue irons don’t seem to use the same type of DIN connector so it doesn’t look to me as though you can swap irons and bases with Hakkos. Besides it’s a Chinese ripoff; I’d rather support the original inventor of such a good product. And I read somewhere that the iron shaft tends to come unscrewed annoyingly often with Aoyue’s version. So I got my first 936 a few months ago at Fry’s Electronics (it was cheaper than online, if you consider shipping). Sorry to hear that it’s now discontinued.

I’m planning a move to Europe so I’m interested in making it work on 230V. It will work on a step-down transformer until I figure out another solution, anyway. I was thinking of designing an open-source board that runs from DC power, using a FET rather than an SCR, so that it can run from a 24VDC power supply; the 24VDC could be supplied by a switching universal supply. Of course it’s a more expensive design but seems to me Hakko could make one like that too, or at least use a transformer with dual primary taps so that voltage is switchable.

http://www.amazon.com/Aoyue-937-Digital-Soldering-Station/dp/B000I30QBW

1.) The WES-50 took about 30 seconds to heat up. A nice Hakko takes around 5-10 seconds.

2.) The WES-50 has tips that are held down by a piece you have to unscrew. With the FX-951, changing a tip is a matter of squeezing latches and pulling the tip holder apart. You get a heat-resistant pad to do this when the iron is hot.

3.) The Hakko tips are a bit thinner.

4.) The Hakko has a sleep feature that turns the iron off after a programmable number of minutes.

I don’t have a tip thermometer, and I don’t think measuring my WES-50 would be useful anyway, since it’s old.

I think the advantage of the more expensive Hakko products is speed; the FX-951 is really meant to be part of an assembly line. If you have a lot of soldering to do, enough such that that 20 second delay after tip changes is going to get really annoying, then the Hakko is probably a good thing to have. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother considering an upgrade.