new gear for soldering⌗

It seems inevitable that there will be upgrades to things that you already purchased, and this week I made two such upgrades. The first was to my headworn magnifying visor. After much deliberation between the visor and a magnifying lamp I decided to stick with the visor but get a nicer one. The cheap one from amazon looked cool but in practice had some drawbacks. It came with many lenses, and the ability to stack two lenses in front of each other, thus magnifying the magnification. Sounds good, but I never used it. Most of the time I found 2x magnification to be the sweet spot. It also came with a lamp, which was battery powered. It wasn’t very bright, and since the lamp and the batteries were all mounted at the front, it made for a very front heavy visor. I ended up removing the lamp portion altogether to try to make the visor lighter. Also the headband itself didn’t hold its size very well, and since I have a big egghead, it was always at the max setting. The plastic material edge was uncomfortable, digging into my forehead or ears.

Enter the Donegal Optical OptiVISOR. A high quality, lightweight magnifying visor, made in North America with glass lenses and a comfortable headband. It weighs 50g less than my previous visor. I ordered the 2x magnification version, plus the small swivelling loupe for one eye, good for final examination of solder joints. In use, the lenses are inside of a enclosed plastic cowl, and the combination of blocking out extraneous light and focusing attention on only what is seen through the lenses seems to make everything sharper and clearer compared to my old visor. The glass lenses help in that regard as well. The headband adjusts nicely, easily accommodating even my massive dome, and stays locked in position. The padding at the forehead is thin but comfortable.

The second upgrade was to my desoldering pump (aka my “solder sucker”). My first one wouldn’t latch anymore, and if the pump won’t latch, it’s pretty much unusable. If you’re not familiar with a solder sucker, it is a large syringe like tool with a button activated spring loaded plunger. Press down the plunger, and release it with the button while you hold the nozzle over top of the liquified solder that you want to remove, or suck. I’m just receiving my new one today, on recommendation from someone in the nlc Discord, so we’ll see how it goes. It’s a Japanese made one with a silicone tube extender on the nozzle. In theory it allows you to get right on top of the iron to suck the solder away. Hopefully it lasts longer than the 6 months of my previous one. At roughly 3x the price I hope so.