Customer Reviews

Coleman PMS7000 Cordless Cold Heat Soldering Tool

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I wish I would have read the other reviews. It would have saved me two trips, one to buy it and one to return it. They claim it is good for small solder joints? It will vaporize fine copper wires. The tip stays hot longer then a few seconds and if you look at the tip wrong it breaks and a new tip costs more than a new cold heat. I have tried it several times on differnt items I really wanted it to work but it just didnt seem like it worked on anything. I returned it and purchaced a butane soldering iron for my portable needs it works great almost everywhere.

You have probably seen the commercials for Coleman Cold Heat battery operated soldering iron. Looks pretty nice on TV, so I decided to buy one and test it out.

The tool works by applying 5 - 6 Volts DC from 4 AA batteries directly to the metallic surface being soldered on. There is an on-off switch, and a white illumination led, plus a red status led; but the heart of the tool is the special split tip, made of some kind of ferro-composite material.

The tip heats up the surface you want to weld by shorting up on it.

The idea basically works, indeed, you can heat up a metallic surface pretty well (though not for very long, in my trials a set of fully charged 2000 mAh Ni-MH batteries lasted less than 10 minutes). But don't throw away your corded soldering iron just yet.

As many of you know, one of the pillars of successful welding is to have a clean well groomed soldering tip that sucks up the solder like a sponge, and releases it to a well fluxed surface. Well, the Cold Heat tips do not hold any solder at all, they repel it.

The technique then is to apply solder directly to the welded surfaces, and that is a much more limited technique with results that can vary greatly depending on the kind of the surfaces being worked with.

Besides, all the shortcomings, this is a truly portable wireless soldering iron, and it is amazing that we have this technology now.

If you haven't already, don't buy this thing, at any price, even steeply discounted. It is in all seriousness, absolutely worthless for it's intended purpose. For anyone without a little mad scientist in them, and doesn't know this already, if you run even a very little power across a graphite pencil lead, it gets very very hot, very very fast. This is basicly the principle on which this tool operates. The point is split in two, joined by a sliver of some no conductive material. And when the two sides are shorted by touching a metalic surface, it does heat up rapidly. Unfortunetly, while in theory it sounds like it would work great, it usually succeeds only in incenerating the contact points on the soldering tip, making little sparks, and breaking away bits of the tip, usually having no usable effect whatsover on the solder. I wouldn't get near anything a value with this tool. All that said though, if you, like me, have already had the misfortune of purchasing this or receiving it as a gift, don't dispair, it's not a total loss. By simply pulling off the removable/replacable soldering tip, and throwing it away, you have a really nice, fully functional small christmas tree light bulb tester. They wouldn't fit the socket & contacts better if it had been made for that purpose all along. And the AA batteries provide just the right amount of power.

Coleman has many good products, but what a shame to even sell this one.

Cons:
- Too hard and frustrating to use. You need the skill of a surgeon to use this. I have to change the tip position all the time just to start the heating process.
- Expensive for something that will likely end up on your next garage sale
- Tip is too big for soldering electronics.
- Has a warning that the tip breaks easily (because it sure does breaks easily).
- Solder fails.

Pros:
- Cordless (But it doesn't work!!!)
- Built-in LED light
- Nice case

This thing is horrible and doesn't work for anything. It won't heat up wires 1/16 diameter, and smaller wires loose thier heat before you can touch the solder to it. It won't even melt solder directly.
The white LED light turns off once it makes a connection with your work, so don't think it's going to be a good working light!

Waste of money

I bought the hype on this product, after all it was a Coleman and their laterns, stoves etc. are pretty doggone good.
This thing, however, has never worked as advertised, not even close. The first tip disintegrated, the second barely
worked. never soldering worth a flip. Disgusted, I put it out at a yard sale, marked at $1, with no takers.
Don't waste your money.

I thought I'd try this product since it seemed like a neat idea. What a mistake. For starters, the plastic latch tab on the molded plastic case broke immediately. I decided no big deal. A rubber band would do the trick there.

So, I got down to soldering a 24 awg stranded wire to a small solder pad on a circuit board. Frustrating experience. The tip, even though I applied really no pressure at all, chipped and eroded away ad the little spark fired off. At this rate, you'd go through $10 tips really fast. That alone didn't impress me. You have to get the tip seated against the solder point fairly precisely for the tip to begin heating. If you can't manage it, the tip won't stay heated. Once you get it heated, it barely melts solder. The tip also repels the solder, which makes wetting the connection very difficult. After about 10 minutes of trying to get this very basic connection complete, the light went out. Hm. I noticed the batteries rattled around in the case like they were lose - Not held in place within the battery compartment. Sure enough, the batteries were not being help by the battery terminals - The typical spring pressure contacts you find in most AA battery holders. I decided to open it up and see what happened. The spring terminals heated up to the point where they lost their temper and had not ability to clamp the batteries in place. I also noticed that the batteries, even after a number of minutes during dis-assembly, were really hot. I mean REALLY hot.

Stay away from this one at ANY price.

If you can manage to get the thing to melt off a piece of solder, the solder is immediately repelled, so you can't actually get it to melt on the wire. I broke the tip after 10 minutes of frustration.

I think all these reviews just about covers it all, so I will save you the read. I am just so disappointed in this product that I had to make a statement. This tool without a doubt is the biggest POS that I have in my tool box. I have replaced tips, changed out batteries, but since this unit was new it has not worked efficiently for me in any sense of the word!! And I am not saying that it doesn't power up, it is just worthless!! and to think someone got rich off on this product. So don't waste your time, unless your one of those people that need to have gadgets..

Regards
Phil

I bought this a few years back at a local Canadian Tire, I don't even know where the start, this is a pretty terrible product; a complete piece of junk.

I think the major weak-point is the soldering tip on the unit. The tip is very fragile and breaks very easily, you cannot press down very hard (which is sometimes required when your soldering something), I think I ended up breaking about 2 or 3 tips in just a couple of weeks.

It is a poor design, but basically the tip has these two points, and in order to solder something the solder has to make contact with the points. This makes soldering almost imposable if you are trying to solder something less than a millimetre in width.

Another major problem is that the unit itself is quite bulky, which can make it quite difficult to get into tight or hard to reach areas, or where exact precision is needed. Although it uses 4 AA batteries, it goes through them really fast.

I have burnt myself using this thing more times in one week, than I ever had in my entire life using traditional soldering irons. The unit gets hot really really fast, but does not cool down as fast. What ever you do, do not do like in the commercials where they solder something and touch the tip with their finger seconds after using it, seriously... YOU WILL BURN YOUR FINDER OFF!!!

Just about everything that I have soldered (or tried to solder) with this thing, almost every time I found myself repeatedly going back to my traditional soldering iron, which the infomercial calls "old fashioned". I either had to basically redo what I meant to solder in the first place, or had to re-heat the solder to get the joint form right. I found that you really have very little control over how the solder joint actually forms; which can be very crucial if you are dealing with repairing electronics.

You are much better off buying a traditional soldering iron for the same price, and it will work a hundred times better. This thing does is not even come close to working as well as it does in those stupid infomercials.

Anyone who gives this item a good review is probably a vendor trying to get people to buy this worthless garbage. To bad you can give a 0 star rating, so I guess 1 star will have to do.