Weller WX1012 200W, 120V With WXP65 Pencil High Powered Digital Soldering Station

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Price: $499.00    

Product Feature

• Capacitive glass touch screen is chemical and temperature resistant
• Turn and click wheel with enter key and finger guide is intuitive to use
• Multi-purpose USB port for parameter configuration and data logging

Product Description

Weller wx1012 [PRICE is per EACH]

Weller WX1012 200W, 120V With WXP65 Pencil High Powered Digital Soldering Station Review

Nobody ever reviews these things (higher end soldering stations), and the only info you can usually find is a handful of people on a message board. And I'm here to help change that!

First, I can't have anything more than a couple of hours without wanting to take it apart, which I'm sure anyone reading this review can relate to. Fortunately, the station is quite easy to get apart, which is common for industrial things. The front panel is made of ABS plastic, but the touchscreen part is glass. And, quite thick glass at that. The housing is two parts. The top part is a flexible blue plastic, and the bottom is metal. All the parts are pretty thick, which is great, because if there's one thing I look for in a tool that sits largely undisturbed on my bench, surrounded by fairly fragile tools and open electronics, it's that it can take some damage.

The iron seems to be made of plastic, but on closer inspection it's plastic molded around a metal tube. I imagine the metal tube either stops around the little light ring, or there's two metal tubes. Either way, it's sturdy enough and significantly better designed than the older Weller pencils (like the WP80). The handle unscrews to change the tip, and you can get new barrels (but they're hard to find-- I found you can order them from Newark for $12, but they come from the UK so I don't know about shipping costs). The cord is the typical non-melting type you see on nicer soldering irons, and it's super thin and flexible. The grip is nice and rubbery, but a firm kind of rubbery. The kind of rubbery that will hold you in its arms on a stormy night and make you feel safe. It's fantastic.

The stand is super well thought out, which I guess is why they didn't change it. The base is made of a zinc alloy, so it's pretty heavy, and the weight combined with the rubber feet keep it from sliding around. The part that the iron actually sits in is molded bakelite, and won't melt if you just touch the iron to it. It's sort of like the plastic they make ICs out of-- it'll melt, but you'd have to do it intentionally. It holds the iron nice and snug, which, if you read the last section, probably constitutes cheating on the iron's part-- but we're overlooking that for now. The dry tip cleaner works well and keeps all the bits of solder contained and hidden until you're ready to clean it out. I'd say it probably fits into the stand too snugly, though. It should really be a tiny bit smaller, but you don't really need to remove it anyways, so whatever.

One pretty major design flaw is that the little holes that are meant to hold extra barrels (so you can just unscrew one, and screw another one in to change tips) don't hold these barrels very well. The holes are too big. That's a really weird oversight, and I think they just didn't want to use different stands for the 65 and 120 watt iron, which the holes would probably work great with (they worked great with my old WD1002T).

Anyways, we've gone over the build now, so let's get to performance.

The iron heats up (with the XNTA tip) to 350C (about 660F) in under 10 seconds, and heats up from standby mode in under 4 seconds. It does tend to over-shoot, but it gets back down really quick (like a second or two), and basically instantly once you touch the iron to anything. Usually you won't get the iron to anything before it's down to the right temperature, though. There's an option to slow down the heating, which would probably help if that was an issue for you. It won't overshoot in that mode, and still heats up quite fast (it seems to just throttle it earlier, really). You can even speed it up, but then it over-shoots by a lot. I keep it in "standard" mode. It's a nice balance.

There's a little bar on the top of the screen that shows how much power its using (in relation to the iron you're using-- in this case the 65 watt one). This is neat, because it lets you know if you're running out of available power. For instance, at high temperatures on parts mounted on heat sinks, this one kind of runs out of power. But on standard SMD, through hole, audio jacks, switches, etc, it hardly breaks a sweat. The bar rarely gets to half way up, and that's with lead free solder. So, it's plenty powerful, but if you work with big things that suck away a lot of heat, you might want the bigger iron (WX1010-- comes with the WXP120-- more expensive, heats up slower (according to the specs), but about twice the power and more mass).

Setting the temperature is super easy. Just run your finger around the little groove etched in the glass and hit the middle "button". You can set a preset by hitting one of the soft keys on the left side for 3 seconds. And set that temperature by holding your finger there for one second. It's easy to use, and doesn't take long to figure out. There aren't any physical buttons, which in my opinion means there's less stuff to break. But some people don't like digital stuff because it can go bad for seemingly no reason if it's poorly designed. I can see both sides, but I think they did this pretty well.

The iron itself holds a sensor that tells the station if it's been sitting for a while or if you've picked it up. You can set a standby time and temperature, so it'll throttle the iron back after it's sat for, say, a minute. And you can have it turn the iron off after it's sat for however long you set (in my case, 10 minutes). There are three sensitivity settings for the iron to detect movement. I found the stock setting sometimes didn't notice that I picked up the iron very quickly, so I turned it up. Personally, I think it's really a setting to turn down how attached the iron is to its comfy stand (like how attached we are to our beds), but that's just my theory and I have no evidence to back it up.

There's a little blue ring of light on the iron that comes on when the heater is on. You know the iron is heating up if the light flashes-- but that's just how the manual puts it. It doesn't flash, so much as flicker. Like a lightsaber. Which is awesome. Weller really should have attached that motion sensing thing to some lightsaber noises. That would have been awesome for like 4 minutes. Then I'd turn it off. But, again, whatever.

The screen lights up. ... that's pretty neat.

The manual kind of explains things, but it's not that great and is missing some stuff (like the sensitivity setting). Fortunately, most things are fairly self-explanatory, and if you need more info, I've found Weller's customer service is pretty helpful.

I think that mostly covers everything. I rated it 5 stars, based on Amazon's description of what the stars mean, but I'd rather give it like 4.5ish stars, because it's not perfect. But nothing in the world is "perfect."

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