
Customer Review
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful
By Ryan Nash
Amazon Verified Purchase
I was debating between this and the Hakko ball-style sponge holder. After using this one, I'm very pleased with my choice. Stabbing the iron down in to the sponge feels very stable, natural, and comfortable. Stabbing sideways at a ball-style holder seems like it would be awkward. Also, this holder is lower profile (only 1.125" high), so it fits easily into my soldering kit. I've found that I use its built-in iron stand a lot when tinning very small wires (easier to set the iron down and drag the wire across the tip, rather than vise-versa).
Excellent cleaner. Well worth the money.
SIDE NOTE -
I noticed another reviewer mentioned applying flux to his wire sponge to help it "absorb solder", and that (not surprisingly) it didn't have the desired effect. A couple things to point out...
1) The point of a wire sponge or a wet sponge is to improve heat transfer by "shocking" the oxides off your already cleaned and tinned tip. This is most obvious when using a wet sponge, as the correct motion is a quick tap of the tip on the sponge (like you're touching a surface with your finger to see if it's hot) not the long, slow wipe that would be required to remove excess solder.
2) If you wind up with excess solder on your tip, use desoldering braid to wick away the excess. There are only a handful of cases where this should occur. 90% of the time you should be applying the solder to your work piece not your iron, and the capillary force of the work piece should keep the solder where it belongs.
PACE has an excellent series of "learning to solder" and "reworking" videos that they've graciously made available on YouTube. I highly recommend them. They're a little dated, but the basics haven't changed.

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