ZD-985 desoldering station Power supply failure

[sam_sam_sam]

Well I finally finished the two recapping project on the soldering / desoldering stations one that has the sleep feature and one that does not have this feature and have them both working again both of them have 24 volt cooling fans the vacuum / cooling fan motors board has been modified so that the cooling fan sees the full 18 volt power supply and the vacuum pump see the two ohm resistance to limit current

Putting these desoldering stations back together is enough to drive you to start drinking if you normally do not drink first of all you have to put thing back together in a certain order in order to be able to put the unit back together because there is very little space for your hands or fingers to hold the nuts to hold the vacuum pump and the metal plate that holds the vacuum pump motor from moving around but to make matters worse is that there is a hose that is under the vacuum pump that has to be on top of the metal plate but the metal plate wants to be on top of hose so the screws that holds the metal plate to the enclosure just cause you to go mad and throw it across the room but once get through that nightmare then you have to contend with all of the wires from both switching power supplies that have a mind and do not want to corporate with you at all to put the metal enclosure on the switching power supplies is another nightmare because the heat sink “L” shaped metal also has a “U” shape turned on it side and taps on the metal enclosure that all have to line up for it to go together and stay in place

This is the reason I have not recapped these soldering / desoldering stations when I first got them because I did the first couple of them and came to the conclusion that I will take my chances with the switchers going bad by the startup capacitor going bad also some versions of these switching power supply boards are some of the worst to deal with because the soldering traces come off of the board very easily because on one of them I had to use the capacitor leads to repair the traces that just pealed off the board in two different places so that was not fun either

Now it is time to finish the battery testing machine that I have that the mosfets board went bad I just purchased another EBD-A20H battery load tester that only does load testing it does not have charging function on it

The reason for buying another was I want to put the two battery tester that the mosfets board went bad which has an external switching power supply to share the same switching power supply which will be a 12 volt @ 5 amp Mean-well switching power supply which will probably be used at the same time with two different battery packs being tested at the same time because the power supply for the charging system will be separate from the battery controller power supply yes I know that they share a common ground so that means that you would have to have the same voltage on each battery pack which is not a problem because the charging system will be using a buck converter to control the voltage and current to each battery pack that have BMS protection boards on them this is what I was talking about in another post about doing Milwaukee and Ryobi battery testing battery packs that are having issues so I can determine weather or not it is a battery issue or a BMS protection issue because even where I work I have to check the functionality of battery packs that we have for battery operated power tools to determine weather or not it would be better to just buy new battery packs to replace the ones that are having issues

Now the battery / switching power supply load testing machine that I just bought I am going to make a jig that will be used to test switching power supply over a period of time under different loads circumstances and conditions to determine weather or not the switching power supply are worth a shit or not

The reason for this particular project is that I right now do not have an easy way to test switching power supply and torcher test them with a bar graph which I can use the battery testing software for this purpose as well I just have to make the jig for it for easy access to o hook it up

Stay for more to come in its own post and I will give some more detail information on how I will be using it and what the parameters that I will be using

Here is a picture of the battery tester that I have just purchased another one the same exact model which I have exchanged the enclosure that has the switching power supply inside of it the original switching power supply is a 24 volt I replaced it with a 12 volt version of the same exact size of the original switching power supply board

Correction it was three of them that failed but one of them is a failure that is a bit weird in that charging voltage is not as stable as it should be but if I remember correctly it does not seem to have this issue at lower voltages so I not sure exactly what the issue with it is but I had tried to use it with a BMS protection board before so I do not know if was damaged in some way or not

I will have to hook it up to a BMS protection board and see if it is stable enough to use for single battery cells or can I go up with the voltage just a little bit higher than the battery voltage of the battery cells something like a volt or so and will it still have complete control of the voltage and current we shall see if it can be done or am I going to have to just monitor the voltage and current like I going to on the two that the mosfets board completely failed and I just removed them

[sam_sam_sam]

Did we get off topic a bit? I figured there has to be some reason for why you do things a certain way. I've got quite a few battery operated power tools with batteries various brands, but have to have yet a battery completely fail. The older battery packs aren't as good as the new ones (18650 vs 21700 etc). Some older ones started to act weird when not being charged fully a few times in a row so the balance charge cannot kick in. But after discharging them and fully charging, they came out fine again. I think what really does them in is after a full charge, using them hard down (almost) the end and then do not recharge them that day, plus a hot environment.

Well I finally finished the two recapping project on the soldering / desoldering stations one that has the sleep feature and one that does not have this feature and have them both working again both of them have 24 volt cooling fans the vacuum / cooling fan motors board has been modified so that the cooling fan sees the full 18 volt power supply and the vacuum pump see the two ohm resistance to limit current

Putting these desoldering stations back together is enough to drive you to start drinking if you normally do not drink first of all you have to put thing back together in a certain order in order to be able to put the unit back together because there is very little space for your hands or fingers to hold the nuts to hold the vacuum pump and the metal plate that holds the vacuum pump motor from moving around but to make matters worse is that there is a hose that is under the vacuum pump that has to be on top of the metal plate but the metal plate wants to be on top of hose so the screws that holds the metal plate to the enclosure just cause you to go mad and throw it across the room but once get through that nightmare then you have to contend with all of the wires from both switching power supplies that have a mind and do not want to corporate with you at all to put the metal enclosure on the switching power supplies is another nightmare because the heat sink “L” shaped metal also has a “U” shape turned on it side and taps on the metal enclosure that all have to line up for it to go together and stay in place

This is the reason I have not recapped these soldering / desoldering stations when I first got them because I did the first couple of them and came to the conclusion that I will take my chances with the switchers going bad by the startup capacitor going bad also some versions of these switching power supply boards are some of the worst to deal with because the soldering traces come off of the board very easily because on one of them I had to use the capacitor leads to repair the traces that just pealed off the board in two different places so that was not fun either

Now it is time to finish the battery testing machine that I have that the mosfets board went bad I just purchased another EBD-A20H battery load tester that only does load testing it does not have charging function on it

The reason for buying another was I want to put the two battery tester that the mosfets board went bad which has an external switching power supply to share the same switching power supply which will be a 12 volt @ 5 amp Mean-well switching power supply which will probably be used at the same time with two different battery packs being tested at the same time because the power supply for the charging system will be separate from the battery controller power supply yes I know that they share a common ground so that means that you would have to have the same voltage on each battery pack which is not a problem because the charging system will be using a buck converter to control the voltage and current to each battery pack that have BMS protection boards on them this is what I was talking about in another post about doing Milwaukee and Ryobi battery testing battery packs that are having issues so I can determine weather or not it is a battery issue or a BMS protection issue because even where I work I have to check the functionality of battery packs that we have for battery operated power tools to determine weather or not it would be better to just buy new battery packs to replace the ones that are having issues

Now the battery / switching power supply load testing machine that I just bought I am going to make a jig that will be used to test switching power supply over a period of time under different loads circumstances and conditions to determine weather or not the switching power supply are worth a shit or not

The reason for this particular project is that I right now do not have an easy way to test switching power supply and torcher test them with a bar graph which I can use the battery testing software for this purpose as well I just have to make the jig for it for easy access to o hook it up

Stay for more to come in its own post and I will give some more detail information on how I will be using it and what the parameters that I will be using

Here is a picture of the battery tester that I have just purchased another one the same exact model which I have exchanged the enclosure that has the switching power supply inside of it the original switching power supply is a 24 volt I replaced it with a 12 volt version of the same exact size of the original switching power supply board

[CapLeaker]

It does make a difference on how you your battery pack to how you have to test them to get the best results from them and I might be a little bit more accurate about the way I go about it but I want to get as much power from the battery cells as I can and you would be right that I am hard on battery packs when I use to work at the metal shop where we cut to order customers orders and had to repair industrial equipment I used tools harder then than I do now but when I do a project with battery power tools I want to do the work and I do not have time to play around with battery packs that are not up to the task at hand

Did we get off topic a bit? I figured there has to be some reason for why you do things a certain way. I've got quite a few battery operated power tools with batteries various brands, but have to have yet a battery completely fail. The older battery packs aren't as good as the new ones (18650 vs 21700 etc). Some older ones started to act weird when not being charged fully a few times in a row so the balance charge cannot kick in. But after discharging them and fully charging, they came out fine again. I think what really does them in is after a full charge, using them hard down (almost) the end and then do not recharge them that day, plus a hot environment.

[sam_sam_sam]

sam_sam_sam there is still one more option. Buy well branded things, but used. Some of my equipment is so expensive, I had no choice but buying used. I am sure you could find something. As for the battery testers, I am a bit at a loss why you have to have these exact measurements, unless you have an immense source of older battery packs, where you do not know what is what. For me I'd fix the bad cells, discharge the whole
battery, then balance charge them with a hobby chacrger for battery packs and call it a day. Maybe I don't use my batteries that hard every day... I dunno...

It does make a difference on how you your battery pack to how you have to test them to get the best results from them and I might be a little bit more accurate about the way I go about it but I want to get as much power from the battery cells as I can and you would be right that I am hard on battery packs when I use to work at the metal shop where we cut to order customers orders and had to repair industrial equipment I used tools harder then than I do now but when I do a project with battery power tools I want to do the work and I do not have time to play around with battery packs that are not up to the task at hand

[stj]

some used brandname stuff is shit
weller i mentioned, the heater/sensor fails a lot and is fucking expensive.

[CapLeaker]

sam_sam_sam there is still one more option. Buy well branded things, but used. Some of my equipment is so expensive, I had no choice but buying used. I am sure you could find something. As for the battery testers, I am a bit at a loss why you have to have these exact measurements, unless you have an immense source of older battery packs, where you do not know what is what. For me I'd fix the bad cells, discharge the whole battery, then balance charge them with a hobby chacrger for battery packs and call it a day. Maybe I don't use my batteries that hard every day... I dunno...

[sam_sam_sam]

Yeah pay once, cry once. I would loose my shit if I would have to always fix my own crap.

Normally I would agree with pay once and maybe cry once but on some things this does not seem possible when you do not want to spend much money on something that when you read customer reviews on what is supposed to high quality products and have a hard time finding a product that is not a knockoff and replacement parts are also more expensive than they need to be because of only the name and not necessarily better quality

I loose my mind and shit when you have to buy new equipment to just get something fixed because of known issue that has not been addressed by manufacturer and now the manufacturer might have decided to close up shop because now there email account seems to be not valid anymore this is in reference to my battery testing equipment I guess I will have to buy some more new equipment and just modify the ones that do not work correctly as intended what is more aggregating is that no one seems to know exactly what to do when these battery testing machines have this issue

[sam_sam_sam]

I took the soldering iron apart this morning and found that it might have been touching wire that it should not be touching but that is not the bigger issue is that the ceramic that is between the temperature sensor and the heating element just crumpling apart this means that the heating element will fail in a short amount of time or the temperature sensor will fail or both of them together

Update

The desoldering gun does not matter weather or new or used it flashes once very quickly and it reads the temperature correctly I am not sure if this is normal or not because I only have one desoldering gun station that has the sleep function on it I have several of the soldering iron that I have to compare to at boot up

[sam_sam_sam]

They got to stop wanting to go home early on Friday and do their quality work this is nonsense and we as consumers should put up with this nonsense I do not think so

But yes I would agree with you on this one and I will carefully take it a part to not to loose the spring for locking mechanism and see if this might be the case and if it is repairable or not

I took the soldering iron apart this morning and found that it might have been touching wire that it should not be touching but that is not the bigger issue is that the ceramic that is between the temperature sensor and the heating element just crumpling apart this means that the heating element will fail in a short amount of time or the temperature sensor will fail or both of them together

[sam_sam_sam]

for the price, these zongdi units are very good - if you wait for a sale you can find them for $70
yes, you need or will want to replace the fan and maybe recap it partially.
but factor in how cheap they are and it's still a winner
and the entire handpiece with pipe & cable can be replaced for $30 or less!
it would cost me that just for a tip for my old weller unit

This is the same reason I have bought these units from this manufacturer because yea they are not the best quality but for the price of them it in bad

[stj]

i never had to fix mine,
i added a filter and replaced the fan and ceramic resistors as a casual upgrade

[CapLeaker]

Yeah pay once, cry once. I would loose my shit if I would have to always fix my own crap.

[stj]

for the price, these zongdi units are very good - if you wait for a sale you can find them for $70
yes, you need or will want to replace the fan and maybe recap it partially.
but factor in how cheap they are and it's still a winner
and the entire handpiece with pipe & cable can be replaced for $30 or less!
it would cost me that just for a tip for my old weller unit

[sam_sam_sam]

sam_sam_sam
no I don't have this brand talked about in here. I use an old Weller WD1 with the WP80 pen and an Aixun T3A as soldering irons, a Hakko desoldering gun and another old Weller hot air. Everything but the Aixun has over 10 years on the clock and never changed or repaired on them anything major.
I think part of the problem is folks not using a high enough wattage and then compensate with the temperature setting, burning everything to bits and shit, including the iron. I don't touch an iron that has not at least 80W. My hot tweezers for SMD are 50W, but that is the only exception. Try using something higher wattage, run the temp lower and you shall have better results.

The soldering iron wattage is 60 and desoldering gun is I think if I remember right is 80 watts

I would agree with you but there basic desoldering gun start at a little bit above $100.00 and I can get them here in Florida when they have them in stock yes I know that there quality is fair at best but the price in this case wins only because at one time an eBay seller was selling parts for them

One of the reasons I have not purchased a Hakko desoldering gun is because there so many knockoffs that I do not want to pay for a knockoff version I would want a real version of it if it really has the quality that I have read that they supposedly have to justify the higher cost of there unit

[sam_sam_sam]

open the soldering gun and inspect the wiring,
i had one with pinched wires in it that had obviously been assembled on a friday afternoon!

They got to stop wanting to go home early on Friday and do their quality work this is nonsense and we as consumers should put up with this nonsense I do not think so

But yes I would agree with you on this one and I will carefully take it a part to not to loose the spring for locking mechanism and see if this might be the case and if it is repairable or not

[stj]

open the soldering gun and inspect the wiring,
i had one with pinched wires in it that had obviously been assembled on a friday afternoon!

[CapLeaker]

sam_sam_sam
no I don't have this brand talked about in here. I use an old Weller WD1 with the WP80 pen and an Aixun T3A as soldering irons, a Hakko desoldering gun and another old Weller hot air. Everything but the Aixun has over 10 years on the clock and never changed or repaired on them anything major.
I think part of the problem is folks not using a high enough wattage and then compensate with the temperature setting, burning everything to bits and shit, including the iron. I don't touch an iron that has not at least 80W. My hot tweezers for SMD are 50W, but that is the only exception. Try using something higher wattage, run the temp lower and you shall have better results.

[sam_sam_sam]

sam_sam_sam
I do have a question... why in the heck your solder gear is worn out like that? Gee, my stuff also got tons of hours on it but do not have such problem. I wonder if you leave the iron hot all the time? My solder station I use the most is 12 years old and still on the same pen / heating element. Given it went through a few tips, but over all still working like a champ, display and all. My desoldering gun has seen replacement parts as the plastic catching cylinder for the solder, filters etc (also basically consumables) and also works fine as kind. So what gives?

The issue with this brand manufacture is that the quality of their product are fair at best but to answer your question about why I think that they do not last longer is and the reason I went to a version that has the sleep function is that it saves the soldering iron element from going bad sooner also the same thing with desoldering gun

I have never seen this type of failure with the soldering iron and the desoldering gun where the temperature reading is flashing different temperature readings for the first 5 seconds after it boots up now I have seen it where the temperature sensor wire just burns into a break and it just shows ———- or its shows ERR and then one of two things happen either the heater element does not heat at all or it on full blast and burn the heater element out in either case it can be used again

Do you have this brand your self what model number do you have or do you use a different brand what is the model number of the one that you use

Of all of the soldering iron / desoldering guns I have had the following failures

One controller unknown cause of this issue where the temperature controller was not consistent another words it would wander all over the place but this was version one not version two or version three I have not seen this issue with these versions yet

One backlight went out completely and one display module also went bad it just kept getting diminishing letters and numbers across the hole screen but I made one good unit out of the two units

Two switching power supply failures where it would randomly power cycle with cooler weather unknown type of failure

Three vacuum pumps failures but those can be fixed to a certain extent to get more efficient and longer life out of them
In fact I have one right now that I have reconditioned it because it suction power is very low right now

But remember this is over 20 years of doing soldering projects almost every weekend when I have time to devote to it

The versions that do not have the sleep function on them the failure rate was a lot quicker than what it is now with the sleep function built into the system even though it has this function it turns down the temperature to 390*F until you move the handle then it goes back to 675*F for the soldering iron and 775*F for the desoldering gun I have found that these temperatures work the best for the way that I use my soldering equipment I have tried all kinds of different temperatures settings and I find that this works the best for me

Right now I have two dead soldering stations that do not have switching power supplies and one of them does not have a working vacuum pump because it is just plain worn out

The controller works fine on both of them plus I have several more controller modules for spare parts that have never been used at one time I had found an eBay seller that was selling them at a reasonable price so I bought several different models of them so if I had a controller failure I could just replace the controller and when I had time I would look at what was wrong with the controller and try to fix it later

One note I do not have any spare parts for the version that has the sleep function on it these were an upgrade version and the eBay seller did not have this version available

I have two of the same version that have the hot air gun on them and I had an issue with them when I first bought them and it was that it did not have a cool down mode on it but I remedy that issue right away before it could get one hour of running use I added a LED light and a on and off switch and when in the off position that is when it was in cool down it would light the LED the reason for doing it this way was because it has a optic sensor switch that controls the heater element so I did not want the controller to go bad because of no load on the output for the heater element plus it lets me know that it is in the cool down mode

This is my soldering project history of my equipment that I have bought and used for many years now

[CapLeaker]

sam_sam_sam
I do have a question... why in the heck your solder gear is worn out like that? Gee, my stuff also got tons of hours on it but do not have such problem. I wonder if you leave the iron hot all the time? My solder station I use the most is 12 years old and still on the same pen / heating element. Given it went through a few tips, but over all still working like a champ, display and all. My desoldering gun has seen replacement parts as the plastic catching cylinder for the solder, filters etc (also basically consumables) and also works fine as kind. So what gives?

[sam_sam_sam]

Update

I figured out why the controller was flashing the temperature several times with different temperatures it turns out that the soldering is what the issue is because I put one on it that does not do this when powering it on with the soldering iron that does not have very many hours on it

My guess is that the temperature sensor wire might be touching the grounding wire on the iron

If I continue to use it might be with PWM controller on dc voltage and not worry about the temperature sensor wire and its issue I just have to order a couple of replacement soldering irons so I have some spare irons when one goes bad I do not have to wait for another one to get to me

I suspect that the desoldering gun might also be going bad as well but right now it only flashes once but I going to keep my eye on it so when it starts flashing more than once and it starts flashing different temperatures reading I am going to stop using this one as well