DMD, Looking at your solder joints I can see that Hakko is doing to you what my buddie's unit does which is not maintain it's temperature. On his we'd turn it all the way up and wait a couple of minutes to ensure it reached max temperature and for the first solder it was ok (not great), but on the 2nd joint it would already have lost too much heat to continue soldering unless you let it sit to recuperate some of the heat it lost. And we work inside his trailer so there was no flowing air that could be considered. It just doesn't do the job well in my experience.

Overpriced, under powered.

I went with this one because the one with the display was out of stock and back ordered and it's easily the best station I've ever used. Temperature control is accurate and it heats up fast and maintain temp so well I have to turn it way down between joints so to keep from ruining the tip.

https://www.circuitspecialists.com/7...g-Station.html


This is the same unit with LED Display I wanted to get.
https://www.circuitspecialists.com/7...D-Display.html


FYI, these are the exact same units that are RC "branded" and sell for 2 – 4x more money.
If you continue to not have success with the Hakko, return or sell it and buy one of these. I've found the 60Watt units are pretty solid for RC, but only the cheap basic ones that built insane amounts of temperature, but ones with temperature control tend to lack the ability to maintain heat. That's why I went with the additional 15Watts and it was the right call.

As for your soldering job specifically, it doesn't look like you pre-tinned your leads well enough and if you did, you either used too much solder or didn't have the proper heat to get it to soak all the way through the wire.

Looking at your wires, I see 2 things that are immediate red flags for me.

1. You've stripped too much insulation. Usually .125" (1/8) is all you want to strip off the end of the lead. This helps teach how little solder you really need.

2. You used far too much solder on every wire. When done properly to the specification above, wire will lay smoothly from the insulation onward and in yours you can see where the solder is and how far up it ran inside the wire/insulation.

When solder goes too far inside the insulation it makes soldering even more difficult because the iron then has to work much harder to heat up enough to liquefy that mass of solder. And although an iron might reach a proper temperature, once it touches a lead with all that solder, the lead acts like a heat sink and draw temperature away from the iron, resulting in less than stellar joints.

The one thing I urge people to remember is that you only need JUUUUST enough solder on your leads to coat the entire thing all the way through, and that doesn't mean keep feeding solder into the lead until it reaches the underside. Usually solder wont want to soak through to the very bottom of a lead so it's a good idea to tin until it's coated down the sides and then turn the wire over and feed a smidgen of solder to the un-tinned portion of the lead. Also, it's good to have the lead secured and place the iron under the lead and feed solder into the wire from above. this allows gravity to help the wire soak up the solder.

Hope this helps.


Been saying this for some time now but I have to make the time to create a video series to share with you guys. Maybe this weekend.