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I love my WE1010NA and would heartedly recommend it to friends and family. It is very well built, easy to use, and has precise temperature control while soldering components.
DETAILS
As a recently retired engineer specializing in electronic manufacturing for many years, I’ve often borrowed time on different types of soldering stations. Generally, the soldering specialists on the manufacturing floor had Weller-brand stations that were larger (more powerful) and more sophisticated. Still, the WE1010NA gives essentially the same performance, but with a lot more bang for your buck.
👍 The first thing I noticed upon unboxing the WE1010NA was its quality. Though Weller was originally an American company, it is now German. The WE1010NA was designed in Germany and is made in Mexico.
👍 Even the cradle for the soldering iron is made of what appears to be solid die-cast zinc with a durable black powder coating (paint). And that’s good because you want a heavy cradle that doesn’t easily move around and tip over as you use it.
👎 The only thing I didn’t like about the WE1010NA is a small detail on that nice heavy soldering cradle: It had only three holes for spare soldering tips; the remaining five (three in a column to the right and two on top) were smaller ones for accessories of some other sort… I don’t know what. Since I had also purchased the five-piece Weller soldering tip assortment, I wanted a proper home for them, so I merely enlarged three of the smaller holes with a #2 drill bit (Ø 0.221″).
👍 The second thing I did upon unpacking my WE1010NA was check that it truly pushes 70 watts of heating power to the soldering tip; I measured a total soldering station power consumption of 66 watts. Assuming the heating circuitry is 90 percent efficient, that’s 60 watts at the soldering tip, which is close to the claimed 70 and good enough for electronic soldering.
BACKGROUND INFO: What you want with any soldering iron is a quick response to boosting heating power to the soldering tip after you wipe it on the wet sponge and begin soldering. You also want the same quick reaction time when you start soldering something with appreciable thermal mass, like a 16-gauge (1.3 mm²) wire to a contact terminal. And, of course, you want accurate temperatures.
👍 See the accompanying video showing how precisely the WE1010NA controls tip temperature. The first thing I did after unboxing my Weller WE1010NA was calibrate it using its “OFFSET” adjustment feature. In my case, I calibrated it to 183 °C by wrapping the tip with a 63/37 tin/lead eutectic solder, which has a sharp melting point of 183 °C; that is to say, it has no melting *range* throughout which it is partially molten, or plastic. As you can see in the video, my WE1010NA was off by only 2 °C. The eutectic solder wouldn’t melt at an indicated 180 °C and immediately melted and fell off the tip at an indicated 181 °C instead of the proper 183 °C. A simple –2 °C offset, and I had my WE1010NA dialed in perfectly.
HINT: Unless you are building for-sale equipment certified as being compliant with strict IPC specifications, the primary objective when setting the temperature of soldering irons is to keep the tip temperature as low as possible without suffering any tedious delay in getting your components up to temperature; this increases tip life and avoids excessive time dwell and overheating of electronic components. Usually, I keep my iron set to 100 °C beyond the melting point of my solder (283 °C setpoint for 63/37 Sn/Pb eutectic) for low-mass soldering like SMT components and ¼ W resistor leads. And I’ll go as high as +130 or 140 °C beyond the melting point (313–323 °C setpoint for 63/37 Sn/Pb eutectic) when soldering objects with significant thermal mass like larger-diameter wires.
