Home built vacuum desoldering station

[sexzual]

Greetings. I desolder a lot of mechanical keyboard switches. When I started doing this, I was using a simple bulb sucker and iron. Once I started doing more and more switches, and after sampling some higher end units, I decided to step up to a professional unit and bought a $700 edsyn zd500dx. It changed how I did things. It is / was a great machine. But like just about every desoldering station, it had a lot of seals and consumables that needed replacing, and with the amount of desoldering I do, it needed these fairly often. Parts weren't outrageously expensive, but at the same time, to me, more expensive than they should be. Not only that, but they had to be special ordered and took time to arrive. This down time cost me money.

 Once while I was waiting for parts to arrive for my edsyn, I decided to try my hand at making my own desoldering station using the best concepts from the stations I had seen and tried, along with a few ideas of my own.

To my surprise, my design worked just as well, in fact slightly better than my edsyn! I continued to develop it, and this is the final result. After some revisions, it's now significantly faster than my edsyn and with no clogs and far less parts to wear out. This desoldering iron is all I use now.

I posted it to Reddit a little while ago along with a video of it. The reaction I got was way more than expected. Many people reached out to me asking if I would be selling them / when they'd be available. I hadn't set out to produce them for sale, but that's the way it's headed now with the support of the community.

[Leslieann]

Nice work, these have absolutely been overpriced for way too long.

I have been thinking of hooking a vacuum pump to my desoldering bulb for a while now, and after seeing this, I see no reason not to. Just need a reservoir to catch the solder before entering the pump, and that's not too hard to do.

[kriminal]

This is awesome

Sent from my Moto G (4) using Tapatalk

[MatchstickMan]

This is awesome! Do you have the link to the reddit post/video?

[sexzual]

https://www.reddit.com/r/soldering/comments/9hlkxg/home_made_vacuum_desoldering_iron/?utm_source=reddit-android

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