Review on 🔧 TXINLEI 858D Desoldering Station with Tweezers by Logan Tripp

Good first. This device comes with many additional tools. The convenience and economy of this kit is better than most other 858D hot air stations and TXINLEI gets 5 stars for a great kit. Another big plus is that there is a reed switch inside the heated rod handle and there is a magnet in the base mount that activates this switch. When the handle is placed on the bracket, the device powers the heating coil and keeps the fan running to cool the handle. Most 858Ds had a reed switch attached to these buttons with a tiny piece of foam tape. As this band ages, the switch will become loose and the unit will no longer recognize the wand in the stand and shut off the heat, which can result in the handle melting and limiting the fan speed to the last speed the user turned on. A value that is too low and a heating register switched on can lead to the plastic rod melting. TXINLEI have managed to now encapsulate this handle reed switch in a blob of black epoxy to avoid the problems that devices can have with a simple foam tape holding the reed switch in place. Another benefit is the included manual, albeit a short one. has some of the best Chinese English instructions I've seen on other products. The rest is pretty bad. TXINLEI is almost guaranteed not to be an original manufacturer, as hundreds of these 858Ds are sold under different names and variations on the 858D model number (+ etc added at the end). Using the US power cord in the box is not recommended. The first unfortunate downside is that the power cord runs completely in the opposite direction compared to US power cords. It has a LIVE AC voltage coming out of the neutral end of the plug and the neutral wire is connected to the LIVE side of the plug. There is a fuse in the 858D plug. This is meant to be wired/connected to a LIVE wire so that if the fuse blows for safety, the LIVE AC power is shut off and only the neutral and ground are still connected, and if those two pins touch, nothing happens. Because the power cord is connected reversely, if the fuse blows, the neutral wire will be disconnected, and if the LIVE wire and the earth come into contact with the affected person, the consequences can be fatal. As if that wasn't enough, I cut off the end of the power cord. and wanted to properly plug it into the new US plug. I then found that the wires used within the cable that came with the USA 858D were too small/thin. The copper was less than 20 AWG and looked like 22 AWG. The cable is marked European/Metric, not American AWG. Cable colors are not American black, white, green, but European brown, blue, yellow + green. They're 230-240 VAC, we're 110-120 VAC, our lower voltage means we have to carry more amps to get the equivalent performance, so our cable wires need to be thicker. I'm sure the cable might be safe for Europe, but I wasn't comfortable with it and had to buy my own US power cable to use with the TXINLEI 858D instead. Second, what was originally thought to be good (rear panel grounded, chassis grounded) turned out to be bad. The ground on the back of the case on my unit was only at the screw itself. The metal of the backplate didn't make contact with the screw, and the entire backplate wasn't grounded, just the screw. I checked the underside of the chassis, there is no ground. I checked the top and sides of the chassis, there is no ground. I tested the front panel, this is the only panel that is grounded to the entire front chassis. When the device was opened, copious amounts of paint were sprayed on it, and all metal surfaces remained closed and isolated from one another. The screws were not grounded and the chassis was not grounded. I spent half a day working on the chassis to ensure there was proper metal-to-metal contact between all sides when bolted together. The entire chassis of my device is now grounded. With the chassis removed to provide grounding, I could now easily see the electronics board. in unity. The board appears to be single sided and hand soldered. Not all solder joints were made with great care. Much more shocking, however, is the observation that the designer of this board did not take any constructive measures to properly isolate the high-voltage AC parts of the line from the low-voltage parts. In some places there is less than 1mm of insulation between the High Voltage LINE AC pads and adjacent low voltage traces on the board! It should have been much better! Now on my second day of working to get my block working properly and safely on US power, I have completed all of my safety checks and fixes and am now able to test the block for accuracy. Using a Fireboard loaded with calibration chart data to calibrate the temperature sensor being used, I set up a test stand and measured the performance of the heater rod tip with the test sensor on a stand where neither rod nor sensor moved throughout the test Distance about 10 mm from the sensor. end of the outlet pipe. This is where I found that my unit wasn't factory calibrated and was constantly going many times over the set temperature. For example, the set temperature of 100 is 212 Fahrenheit, the measured temperature after 2 minutes of operation that allowed the 858D to reach temperature and stabilize was 279.3 Fahrenheit. I've seen similar errors throughout the specified temperature range. There are no calibration instructions. However, there is a "CAL" hole just above the two red adjustment buttons on the front panel. Using a small flat head screwdriver I accessed the potentiometer in the hole. Here I found my potentiometer turned all the way in one direction, so not immediately calibrated, full overshoot. With a set temp of 100, which is 212F, it was relatively easy to set up, so the outlet temp actually measured 212F. However, if a higher temperature is set, the higher the set temperature, the greater the error. Nobody uses 100°C as a true soldering temperature, so I took the desired operating temperature range of 180°C to 333°C and took the average to calibrate the device to 256.5°C. Here I found the calibration potentiometer useless as intended. At these preset temperatures above 100, the "sensitivity" of the potentiometer was too high. A tiny rotation of 2-3 degrees in one direction can cause the exit temperature to vary by 30F degrees or more. The ideal 256.5°C cannot be reached. After an hour it was close enough that I repeated the test with the same temperatures set and the same 2 minute wait between setting the temperature and taking a temperature reading. The results were eye-opening. The set starting temperature of 180 was 60.3 Fahrenheit too high. The set temperature I calibrated was perfect. The set temperature of 333 had a measured temperature below the set temperature of 25.9 Fahrenheit too low. I recommend that nobody waste time calibrating these devices. Instead, I recommend getting a good gauge. Experiment with the set temperature until you get what you want from the measured temperature, and then try that out for your particular type of solder. If it works, great, write down that set temperature and use it over and over again until you change solder, then you need to do all the measurements before using the process over and over again. They take care of all security issues. While you're at it, you'll need them to properly program the microcontroller that's used to control the temperature output of the convection station. Only a PID controller program is required for these units to have an outlet temperature of +/- 1-2 degrees C from what the user sets as the setpoint temperature. Anyone enterprising enough can attempt to reprogram the microcontroller themselves or replace it with a program that does just that and adds more security features. When the probe is inserted into the cradle, the black front panel fan speed control should be turned off and the probe cooling program will set the fan speed to 100% power until the probe cools. This makes this TXINLEI 858D much safer than all competing 858D hot air stations.