I learned "proper" soldering in summer school over 25 years ago, and have kept a decent soldering iron on hand ever since. My go-to favorite has been theHakko FX-888D for everything from small repairs around the house, to prototyping, to RC building. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't awfully interested in a soldering station that cost nearly ten times as much. How could it be THAT much better? Well, as with everything, "it depends". For my day-to-day use, the Hakko is fine. Great, even, when you get into changing out the soldering tips. But you don't quite get to microsoldering with the FX-888D. You can change out tips and get close-ish on size, but when you want to do real microsoldering with Hakko gear, you need to move up to the [[ASIN:B00OBQGLGG FX-951] and by the time you've added a micro pen and tweezers, you're about halfway to what this costs. But that only gets you as far as "can I start doing microsoldering?" If you can swing it, this is so much better. And more in the "is it worth twice as much?" range. (Answer: yes.) Having two-channels in the space of one makes life a lot easier when you're working on a project that has different soldering needs. No waiting for the tip to cool down to switch it out, or putting unnecessary stress on your pen connections to swap out tools. This station also pushes out excellent power, where you're going to be able to touch just under 1,000 F if you need it. And the precision you get is +/- 4 F, which I've confirmed several times in thermal testing. Do I need such narrow tolerance? Well, no. But boy... do I like it. The jaw-dropper for me is how fast this reaches temperature. Under 10 seconds every time, and I'm good to go. That, combined with how removing and replacing small soldered IC's has been a total game-changer with the tweezers, have really impressed me. You don't really notice until you've used it a few times just how nice it is that the power unit is like "Hey, these are tweezers, and need to be treated differently." As part of a soldering ecosystem, the stackable setup is especially useful for being able to have multiple soldering solutions available, without giving up too much real estate in your work space. If you have a specific need for microsoldering -- so you're an RC enthusiast who is rebuilding ESC's instead of wiring them, or you're in to retro gaming so deeply that you're replacing PCB components, or you want to run a cell phone repair store -- this is completely awesome to have. Otherwise, I'm not sure it hits the marks you're going to look for if you're doing general soldering.
