Update: my notes about my METCAL PS-900 soldering station are on my personal wiki, over here: METCAL PS-900 Soldering Station.

The other day I was doing some soldering with my Horusdy Soldering Station but I got the feeling its soldering iron was under performing. I just wasn’t getting good solder joints even though I was using good solder and plenty of flux.

So today I did some research and found myself a new soldering station: METCAL PS-900 Soldering Station. I found one for sale on element14 for AU$458.59 which as far as I can tell was a really good price. They were going for more like AU$700+ on Amazon, eBay, and even AliExpress.

I did also research and consider some other options from JBC, Metcal, Weller, and Hakko.

I also picked up a couple of spare tips:

• METCAL SFV-CH10, 30° Chisel, 1 mm Soldering Iron Tip x2
• METCAL SFV-CH20, 30° Chisel, 2 mm Soldering Iron Tip x1
• METCAL SFV-CN05, Conical, 0.5 mm Soldering Iron Tip x1

The tip it came with was the METCAL SFV-CH10, 30° Chisel, 1.5 mm Soldering Iron Tip.

I am expecting that the 1 mm chisel tip is going to be my weapon of choice, so I got two of those. (Update: this was a mistake, the 1.5mm or 2mm option would have been a better choice.)

Conspicuously absent on this soldering station is a temperature setting. That’s because these METCAL irons come with SmartHeat technology, as ChatGPT explains. For the SFV-CH10 the Curie point is designed to maintain a nominal tip temperature of around 380 °C (715 °F) under typical load conditions.