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Youyue 858D hot air gun first look
by snm, January 14th, 2018
Purchased a YOUYUE 858D Hot Air Gun Rework Station SMD Solder Soldering Digital 110V 700W, for $45.99 minus a $5 Amazon “coupon”. Planning to use along side a soldering station for various electronics projects where hot air beats the iron.
Unboxing and assembly
Arrived in a box within a box, labeled “SI858D Made in China”:
and an upside-down barcode X001CFII1L Youyue 858D Hot Air Gun Rework Soldering Digital 110V 700W Made in China. Some assembly was required: screwing on the handle, plugging in the cables, but that’s it.
Desolding SMD answering machine SOIC
First some practice, test it out desoldering a small surface-mount chip on the board from AT&T 1739 Digital Answering Machine teardown and resuscitation attempt. Turn on the air and heat, wave the gun around:
It lifts off, easier than expected, with anti-static tweezers:
I couldn’t read the label on this IC too well, but it says Atmel, makers of the AVR family of microcontrollers, now owned by Microchip. AVR is/was popular as the microcontroller family for the Arduino platform, but now ARM and ESP chips are gaining ground.
While I was blowing air on this micro, also blew off two surface-mount diodes, and then later intentionally desoldered two more:
Now for a real challenge.
Desoldering through-hole microswitches on the RPTV
Pioneer SD-P453S Rear-Projection (RPTV) teardown: inside an 80s vintage big screen TV provided a wealth of parts, but I have a particular interest in the 14 pushbuttons on the frontpanel board since I’m running low:
These could be desoldered with a soldering iron, but then I would use solder or flux, or soldering braid, and wear down the soldering tip. Turning to the hot air gun, I desoldered them all:
The only casualty was one of the buttons, which I pulled too hard with pliers and opened it up, but all the other 13 survived. Hot air desoldering feels a lot different than desoldering with a soldering iron, it is much drier, the solder can melt without beginning to flow as a liquid. The main difficulty was positioning the boards to allow an acceptable amount of force in the proper direction to pull out the components, but I managed. Practice makes perfect.
Next steps
There are many clones of the “858D” hot air rework station. Dave Jones reviewed another variant in EEVblog #167 - Atten 858D Hot Air Rework Review. But I went with the Youyue due to EEVblog forums: Youyue 858D+ some reverse engineering + custom firmware and supposedly perhaps better build quality.
Could be interesting to try replacing the firmware, but the stock firmware seems to work reasonably well for my purposes so far.
Besides soldering/desoldering, I also ordered some heat shrink tubing: 580PCS 8 Sizes 5 Multi Color Polyolefin 2:1 Heat Shrink Tubing Tube SleeveTube Assortment Sleeve Wrap Wire Kit tubes Kits, awaiting arrival, which could be useful to use with this hot air gun for insulating spliced wires or other components.