if it is any consolation, I can tell you how that likely happened Photekq.
When you fasten the screw you see there with the metal barrel, the PCB inside has to slide into a slot in the ceramic part. If it doesn't, you will press the ceramic part against the edge of the PCB a few mm earlier than it should. If you keep screwing it, the ceramic will be pressed and eventually buckle and crack.
Well that sucks.. Seems that replacements aren't too cheap either. I'd probably need a working soldering iron to install them too.
Considering a Hakko right now..
at your level of expertise, photekq, i think a hakko 888d would be a good choice. the trick with the 888d is that it's pretty high power and it's easy to burn stuff up. one of the goals of the cl1841 project is to make it very easy to make good joints (and bad joints, but that's how you learn) but very hard to destroy things via overheating, etc. i want to make a fail-_soft_ platform for people to work with. it's much better to make 100 bad joints that you can reflow non-destructively than to destroy a single pad and then have to work around that.
that said, the cl1841 package can be made available quite soon. basically, i realized that i'm a horrible guinea pig for figuring out how effective it will be. i have a loaner that i've made available to photoelectric for the "rescue the destroyed LZGH project". if that goes well, i can either run a gb at cost + a small percentage (i really really want to sell them at cost if at all possible) or buy a small stock and just try to keep costs down so that it comes in appropriately under an 888D.
the founder of edsyn really wanted to serve the hobbyist community and designed some fantastic high quality tools for doing so that i really want to take advantage of, but from a profit-making standpoint their higher-margin product (which looking closely at i'm slowly realizing beats the crap out of equivalent hakko hardware) has to take precedence right now, so i'm purposely not pushing too hard on them right now. they're a fantastic resource for us, though and I really hope to provide some fantastic edsyn based kits as soon as will be convenient for them.
i will point out though that the exposed ceramic element is something that is a hakko trademark and NOT a yihua trademark. in fact, my 888d heater is starting to show its age with reduced heat transfer than when i first bought it (i use the crap out of it obviously). this is just one place you can see where edsyn is extremely intelligently designed. instead of putting a smaller exposed heater (exposed heater -> better heat xfer) in their baseline unit, they use a larger, more powerfuly completely sheathed heater which will last substantially longer. all edsyn products are all also 100% made in the USA 15 minutes from me, so service is trivial. get it back to me, i'll bring it in, and your product will be fixed by a team of professionals that are awesome, friendly and extremely capable. no screwing around.
ps, i've been looking at a lot of this stuff because my Edsyn contact (who is lurking and has popped his head out a couple times
has been trying to get me into one of his upcoming extremely nice looking but very expensive high quality do-everything stations. i think he's starting to win. :X look out for a possible hakko selloff (ANOTHER ONE) from me in the next few months
for our part, i'm getting him hooked on keyboards. i'm just going to declare victory on that one. it's still in progress, but yah, it'll happen.
