WEP 882D Hot Air Rework Station

Only complaint is that gun and air blower doesn't seem to turn off once you heat them up, the dial is not reliable after you start the gun. You can still kill the power, but it's not intuitive.

I usually don't write reviews but for this product and company I am doing so because customers that are on the fence making a decision or customers looking for a great product and need to know if your purchase won't be throwing money into the wind, listen now to what I have experienced: The product is great. I use it for big jobs, small jobs, it has conquered every project with perfection. Comes with a variety of tips and can easily change out a custom tip due to it utilizing a common tip standard. The product becoming usuable from room tempature is nearly instant. If your soldering say a subwoofer, I think the most you will wait is 1 minute. The tempature set is very accurate with the ability to manually adjust and calibrate. The blower heating element is no different. Very quick to heat up, can be adjusted and I have used it for several motherboard projects (remember to use quick heat no residue flux) and removing IC's/chips has been a breeze. Probably because I do a lot of repairing and tinkering the product did fail after 3 months. But this is the best part! WEP product support is the best on the planet. I kid you not, same day this company had a replacement part in the mail. They suspected it was the iron itself because everything worked but the iron and to be honest I thought the same. Unfortunately after the replacement part arrived I had to email support back with the update that even with the new iron, the tip wasn't heating. Without hesitation they sent a brand new complete unit which arrived rather quickly, maybe 3 or 4 days. The unit arrived almost completely crushed. I again reached out to the same support agent with the bad news. They overnighted another complete system I opened a day later! Where do you find better product support on this planet? They even let me keep everything extra they sent. So I have a soldering station with only the blower working. I have a crushed soldering station I will soon take apart and salvage for spare parts. A brand new soldering iron with all the tips. A brand new complete Soldering Station with tips, solder, remover etc. I won't need a new soldering iron / station for a very long time. WEP the company and WEP 882D the product earns five stars and potential customers fear not. This is the best product at this price point and you can buy it knowing this product has the best support on planet earth. Hit buy now.

No issue so far, I bought it to do minor electronic work and some smaller component soldering. Works great for all I need it to. Can’t speak to how accurate the temperature monitoring is, but it gets as hot or less hot as I’ve needed it to. I like that the irons detachable so it’s replaceable although I wish the heat gun was the same, but a great design overall. The attached tip cleaner is convenient and the included tips do any job I’ve come up against. If you’re looking for a cheap and intuitive adjustable soldering iron or heat gun look no further.

I have had this unit since Christmas, but hadn't been able to put it to use until the past few weeks. This unit has been everything I had hoped for and more - frankly, it has exceeded my expectations! The unit is compact enough to keep on my desk, and it is convenient to use - easy to adjust temperature, clear readouts, easy to switch from the hot air to the iron and vice-versa. This is my first experience with a hot-air unit, and I am so glad I got it - so convenient for SMD work. I have found it equally effective for initial soldering of SMD components (using solder paste) and for re-work. On the prototype board I have been working on, I have been experimenting with different resistor and capacitor values, and must have soldered, de-soldered, swapped out, and re-soldered some of the components at least a dozen times, with no problems. I can't (yet) comment on the longevity of the unit, but thus far it has worked flawlessly. It feels like it is well built; switches and knobs work smoothly. I'm impressed! Highly recommended. Update 1 year later: I have continued to be extremely pleased with this unit. I do not use it heavily, but from time to time I have been in the midst of a project and have used it for several days in a row, a few hours at a time. It continues to do everything I have needed. The hot air wand allows soldering small SMD components with excellent results (typically using a dab of solder paste on each contact, but sometimes re-soldering an SMD component onto an existing bit of solder with a dab of flux), and I also use it frequently at a lower setting for heat-shrink tubing. The regular iron has sufficient range to solder smaller components at lower heat or to solder onto a ground plane or heavy-gauge wire with the heat turned up. Auto-sleep mode works flawlessly. I don't know if my experience is typical or if I happened to get a unicorn unit, but I am astonished at the performance - not just its performance relative to its affordable price, which is even more impressive, but its performance overall. I don't have any experience with high-end, expensive units, so I don't know what I may be missing ... but I have yet to think of anything I wish for that it cannot do. The only thing I can think of to complain about - and it's not much of a complaint - is that the vacuum desoldering tool is pretty much useless. If you are buying the unit for that feature, don't - get a powered unit that applies heat to the desoldering tip. That said, they could eliminate the vacuum desoldering tool from the listing, and it would not change my evaluation of the value of this unit at all. Still highly recommended.

The soldering iron and hot air tool heat up very quickly to temp. It appears as though (at least for the soldering iron) the temp is regulated very well. (Having been certified as MIL-STD-200 and IPC-A-610 and in electronics manufacturing, I can tell when an iron won't recover and regulate heat well.) This is to say, I can't really verify if a set value is a correct value- but, once it is set, it keeps its heat. I soldered pin headers and larger components with it for its trial run. A very feature of this unit is that, when you turn a tool off, the display stays on to view the current, ongoing temperature. Also, the hot air tool continues to supply air to cool down more quickly. The tools are independently controlled and can be active at the same time. A bonus of this item is that it is lightweight and has a small footprint, considering that the rework tool is, as is necessary, a significant size. This means that it's portable and takes less real estate on your workbench. In fact, I used this in my hotel room. A downside of that small size is that it wants to move around quite a bit. I recommend something like a mouse pad or other rubber to stabilize it on your workbench. The soldering iron fits snugly into its holder, which IS nice- but the light weight unit has to be held on to when removing the iron from its holder when it is fully seated. Again, fastening to a small board or using a rubber pad could help this. Lastly, it would be really nice if the hot air tool could be removed from the unit- as I don't use this tool nearly as often as the iron. However, expense would be higher in order to make this modification at the factory. Overall, the missing star is just a workflow thing- I felt like I had to have my extra hand on it to use it, and the unnecessary hot air tool and cord gets in the way. While you can easily modify your station to remove this issue, the fact is that, out of the box, you will find it a bit lightweight for constant use.