- Joined
- Feb 11, 2009
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On the right is my beloved Hakko 936. I love this iron so much that I have a NIB spare in my closet that I bought when they discontinued it. It's many revisions old but the newer ones all look like Fisher Price toys to me so I never saw the need to upgrade. Then a random trip down the YouTube rabbit hole had me discovering that there all sorts of newer tech out there so I bought myself a Pace ADS200 direct heat (AccuDrive) iron.
The 650 is Fahrenheit. There's a program setting to convert to Celsius as well as a host of other options including my favorite: auto-off. It also has an auto-setback timer so it will lower the temperature when it senses that it hasn't been used for a certain amount of time.
The base is a US-made, all-metal 120-watt monster. The iron is a "cartridge iron" which means that the tips now contain the heating element along with the ability to measure the temperature, all of which means that it should be able to solder the smallest components then move over to soldering guitar pots just by swapping the tip, which Pace says you can do while hot (it comes with rubber coated tools for this). The Hakko is about 60 watts and soldering something like guitar pots was always an exercise in frustration. In fact, I would always just use my Weller 200W gun for that. Let me tell you, those big old guns are not the most nimble things to be waving around a guitar.
The new iron has a much smaller handle and the tip is much closer to that handle than on the Hakko. That's going to take me a while to get used to since I've been using the Hakko for probably 15 years. Supposedly they got surgeons or surgical tool people to help them design the new handle, but I don't know how true that actually is.
Here's a pic of the tips removed from both irons. The top is the Hakko which has the traditional heating element with the tip sitting over it, held in place by the barrel. On the bottom is the Pace, where the tip *is* the heating element and is replaced all in one.
I don't have the larger tips for it yet, but I am dying to try it on some guitar pots because it is supposed to be night and day from anything I've used before.
The Hakko iron was probably around $100 new, which is what they sell for now. The Pace was $330 as a kit with three tips, the iron, and the iron stand. all of which are made of metal, BTW.
I kind of which I'd bought it before soldering the 2000+ solder points on my relay computer!
The 650 is Fahrenheit. There's a program setting to convert to Celsius as well as a host of other options including my favorite: auto-off. It also has an auto-setback timer so it will lower the temperature when it senses that it hasn't been used for a certain amount of time.
The base is a US-made, all-metal 120-watt monster. The iron is a "cartridge iron" which means that the tips now contain the heating element along with the ability to measure the temperature, all of which means that it should be able to solder the smallest components then move over to soldering guitar pots just by swapping the tip, which Pace says you can do while hot (it comes with rubber coated tools for this). The Hakko is about 60 watts and soldering something like guitar pots was always an exercise in frustration. In fact, I would always just use my Weller 200W gun for that. Let me tell you, those big old guns are not the most nimble things to be waving around a guitar.
The new iron has a much smaller handle and the tip is much closer to that handle than on the Hakko. That's going to take me a while to get used to since I've been using the Hakko for probably 15 years. Supposedly they got surgeons or surgical tool people to help them design the new handle, but I don't know how true that actually is.
Here's a pic of the tips removed from both irons. The top is the Hakko which has the traditional heating element with the tip sitting over it, held in place by the barrel. On the bottom is the Pace, where the tip *is* the heating element and is replaced all in one.
I don't have the larger tips for it yet, but I am dying to try it on some guitar pots because it is supposed to be night and day from anything I've used before.
The Hakko iron was probably around $100 new, which is what they sell for now. The Pace was $330 as a kit with three tips, the iron, and the iron stand. all of which are made of metal, BTW.
I kind of which I'd bought it before soldering the 2000+ solder points on my relay computer!
