[Coco] Soldering Iron

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 22 February 2007, Torsten Dittel wrote:
>> If you see a weller, please move to the
>> other side of the street, cooper tools bought them 20 years ago and
>> they've been crap ever since.  OTOH, I have a weller WTCP-1 thats over
>> 40 years old & still works fine.  Looks pretty rough though, its had a
>> LOT of use.
>
>I have a Weller Magnastat station from '77. Still my first one (gosh, I
>started soldering with 8) and works perfectly for me. I use the very hot
>points (7?), you just have to be fast enough.... Reads "Cooper Group
>Germany". When did they buy it?

I bought that one when I was in Rapid City SD, in about 1960, maybe 61.  
Its the original black brick & made well before Cooper bought them.  The 
only thing I've had to do it other than replace tips was the end of the 
barrel got dished in from screwing the tips down too hard and I had to 
dis the handle and put a teeny kink in the pull wire that reaches from 
the magnet inside the tip barrel back to the switch to shorten it about 
the same .020".  Also had to shorten the cable at the brick end due to a 
flexure break.  That's it.  Most of the outer jacket on the handpiece 
cable has fallen away though.  That iron probably has 25,000 hot hours on 
it with 550 to 800 degree tips in it.  Still the original heater.  Later 
ones have a heater life of maybe 6 months under an 8/hrs/day operating 
schedule.  Junk...  But, despite a grounded tip, that mechanical switch 
still makes too much of a static jolt for cmos circuitry so I wouldn't 
trust it 100% around cmos stuff.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.