"Rich Klestinez" wrote in message
...
I used to work for a company (ARCO Oil) that used a bunch of those. Weller
closely guarded their schematics and even now they will not release them.
We sent them in for repair but they charged about as much as to buy a new
one. Here is what I found over fixing a dozen or so.
1) The wire nuts came loose inside
2) Intermittent wires in the cable going to the soldering iron. Flex the
cable while ohming end to end.
3) The surface mount electrolytics go bad. These were MOST of the
failures and I ended up changing all of them in the rest of the 25
irons we used over about 3 years.
4) The cheap temperature set wire wound pot gets worn out.

Most of the parts in this unit are consumer rated parts and are available.
Never had any problems with the ceramic boards in the units or with the
printed resistors on them. Had a couple of chips fail. It's an A to D
with a seven segment driver built in. They are available still.

Other than the above, they are really a darn good soldering iron and keep
the tip temperature regulated fairly closely.

I still have 2 of them so if you decide to throw them away, send them to
me and I can use them for parts to keep mine in repair. I will reimburse
you for your shipping.

I have more info If you need it.

Rich Klesstinez
3728 Crestline Rd
Fort Worth Tx 76107

Email:
(my name, lower case, no spaces) at charter (dot) net


Thanks for the reply. I will probably keep the soldering station. It seems
to work fine, just no display. Weller made another modle that seemed to be
the same unit without the display. I guess that if Weller did repair them,
they probably just changed out the controller board. Similar to what the
Commador computer people did. They had a flat repair rate. Don;t recall
exectally,but it was something like the board cost them $ 50 and they
charged about $ 70 to repair the computer. All they did was throw away the
old insides and replace them. Seems this way is cheeper than the labor to
repair them.