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Comment by ssl-3 | Hacker News Reader

It heats to exactly the temperature I want in 3 seconds? Is there evidence to support this claim?

(My bullshit detector is making some rather profound gurgling sounds.)

edit: Seriously, my dudes. Links, or it never happened. Anecdotes are just anecdotes. Anecdotally, my soldering iron heats up very quickly as well and I'm very pleased with this, but I'm not making a claim that it heats to an exact, unspecified user-selected temperature in 3 seconds. If you want to present a benchmark, then please present the bench -- with the mark.

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This is what JBC's marketing claims: https://www.jbctools.com/top10.html

Though from looking at some of the chatter about it online, this is only one specific tip they make under ideal conditions, and it seems like often they overshoot the temperature by more than a little on warmup (though this will be the slowest to recover with the tip just held in air as opposed to when actually soldering). Either way, I've used similar products and this kind of speed isn't a crazy suggestion to me.

Yup. They specify 3 seconds, but that's for 350C. In my experience, it's always at the right temperature by the time I finish picking it up.

It has a 240W power supply, so it's not just marketing.

Depends on mass/element power.

My TS101 heats up in like 3-4 seconds (330c) on a 100W laptop PD USB C. It doesn't have a lot of mass but it's perfect for microcontroller related stuff. Just not power electronics.

I can make no claims as to the brands mentioned in the parent post, but a 3 second heating time isn't all that fast for a real nice soldering iron. Previous job had an iron that'd heat between you picking it up and moving it over to the PCB. That one was stupendously expensive from what I heard, but I can only imagine that tech has gotten a lot cheaper since then.

> Previous job had an iron that'd heat between you picking it up and moving it over to the PCB. That one was stupendously expensive from what I heard, but I can only imagine that tech has gotten a lot cheaper since then.

Metcal Fixed Temperature Induction soldering irons. Still the gold standard after decades because instead of using PID with a heating element and sensor, it exploits the curie effect. The tips are made of a special alloy that is only magnetic until a certain temperature after which it doesn’t absorb any more energy from the PSU, which just dumps a constant 25Mhz signal into the tip keeping it at the fixed temperature.

When their patents expired a couple of Metcal engineers left to found Thermaltronics, which makes the same soldering iron (they’re even tip compatible!) for 2-3x cheaper. They’re still more expensive than hobbyist soldering irons but well worth the cost for anyone doing a lot of soldering. The Metcal power supplies are beasts though so you can easily pick up a 20 year old unit for a couple hundred bucks on ebay and it’ll run till the apocalypse comes home to roost. I have an old unit made in the late 90s that is still going strong.

I understand the skepticism, but it's really just a simple application of negative feedback. There's a 200W-ish variable power supply, a thermocouple right at the tip, and a software PID controller. So it's no mystery why it works so well.

Live demonstration: https://youtu.be/BepVEStPmJk

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