Neon John said:
I've been working at the Ford level for years. Now I'm ready for a
Bentley ride
I've been quite happy with Hakko myself; I've used their 'gold standard'
three-position workstation (iron, desolder, hot air; built in air/vacuum
pump) and it's quite nice. The iron heats up very quickly, enough that
you can leave it idling in the cradle and not notice. The FX-888
(competes with the WES[D]-51) isn't as fancy, but does a nice job.
The desoldering tip got fucked over, but I suppose that would happen to
any equipment untrained operators are allowed on.
Used a Metcal once a long time ago; I don't remember it being
extraordinary, but I wasn't doing anything special with it either ('twas a
summer internship
). I do recall it had no adjustments, but always
seemed to work alright.
Pretty well. The Roy 1500 (induction heater) is selling quite well
considering the amount of advertising we've done (zero). We've about
maxed out our production capacity so we're looking at box builders in
the San Diego area (recommendations welcome).
Cool!
Had a little setback this summer. About 3 months ago Garett was
diagnosed with a golf ball sized brain tumor in the frontal left
ventricle. They whacked it out about 8 weeks ago. Benign and
attached to the brain with a well defined stem which let them easily
get it all. Garett is now fully recovered and is hitting on all 8
again.
Yikes! Good thing it was benign, not that you want anything else growing
in that kind of location regardless!
I'm working on the 3kW version of Roy and on a 10kW high frequency
unit, more or less simultaneously so I have my hands full. The Roy
3000 is almost finished so that's good.
Cool. Is that improved much, or pretty well the same thing, scaled up? I
forget what all protection circuitry you had in that thing; I do recall
you had programmability (CPLD or FPGA), so it need not be a big change,
which is nice.
I've been idly working on projects myself; the latest is a parallel
port-GPIB hack, since I'm too stubborn to buy a proper dongle (to be fair,
even the Chinese ones are somehow $100). This goes with my scope, which
is old enough to have GPIB only. (Did I mention I got a digital scope?
http://www.seventransistorlabs.com/Images/GD8.jpg )
Tim