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What’s something you own that has truly paid for itself?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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I got a hot air rework station with a soldering iron many years ago.
The things I've repaired with it are so numerous, I cannot even recount them all, but here are a few:
Even though some of that work was just replacing old capacitors, I have saved so much money by buying "broken" stuff and fixing it up. No regrets. Over the years, I paired the station with a hotplate and a solder sucker and now I could probably open up an electronics repair shop. But I mostly do these repairs for fun. Fixing things calms my mind and soothes my soul.
You need to get in touch with your local Repair Café! It's sounds like you would make a perfect addition. :)
Can you post a gear list? I got an iron a while ago and some crappy Amazon sucker tubes but I really think I'm missing some stuff because I'm either missing stuff or using crappy solder. I like to try and just take components off boards for practice but even that is a huge struggle. I've fixed a couple things but it's rough work for sure.
I know it's probably a skill issue, but I think some other tools might make certain things a bit easier as well, but without someone I know to ask questions I don't want to just buy some random stuff.
Have a lot of fun! Soldering get's really easy if you have the right gear. Swapping out the crappy amazon solder with the good stuff from Praud made the biggest difference, imho. You can already solder a lot of stuff with a 30W soldering iron from the hobby store, but flux and solder are what's really important.
There's a lot of really cheap solder on amazon with way too high melting points. Sometimes the sellers just lie on their datasheet, I once fell for CFH fake solder which barely melted, even when I had my iron on overdrive. It wasn't me, it was the crappy and fake product!
Thank you so much!
I have a Weller WLC 40w, I did a good bit of reading before I bought it but I might have missed the mark. I got a brass sponge that I stuck in an old metal canister, and some of those crappy plastic unpowered vacuum suckers off Amazon.
I did buy my solder on Amazon, I wonder if that's been an issue. It's this: Kester 24-6337-0010 44 Rosin Core Solder 63/37, and I don't use flux with it.
The solder you have, is it regulated because of lead content? I can go buy a hunk of pure lead without question so it's weird to me if that's the case.
Heat the metal, heat the PCB a little bit, then solder. I'm terrible at soldering and my friend just taught me that trick.
I love both my eBook reader (that 505 won't die) and my PS3 (which could really use a reflow).
How difficult would you say reflowing one of the OG 60GB models is?
If you need to swap the RSX out, you'll have no chance with a hot air station. You will need an infrared rework station. Reflowing the RSX is only a short-term solution, because the underfill of the chip itself has a defect. All 90nm RSX chips are bad.
There are people putting a 65nm (or 40nm) chip from the later models into the FAT PS3's. This is called the "Frankenstein mod" and some repair shops in the US are providing that service. If you want to have a FAT lady that will last forever, I'd say this is the best solution.
I was really lucky, because I got my model going by swapping out the Tokin capacitors (but I'm aware this probably won't last when the RSX finally gives up). The FAT PS3 board is very thick and sucks away a lot of the heat. I needed to put the board on the preheater and then used hotair combined with that to remove the caps.
Eventually I'll get around to fixing it, right now it will power up find and then will cut out after a few minutes... Or at least that's what it was doing last time I messed with it so it's just been unplugged and back in the box for nearly a decade now.
Thanks for all the info, definitely let's me know not to just toss it in an oven (that was the original plan, then I shelved it).