0x002B - Metcal MX-500 "Repair"
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 เม.ย. 2018
- I have a failing Metcal MX-500 and decided to see if I could make it work.
That really bugs me I couldn't "solve" the issue. Maybe it will come back, maybe it wont. It's hard to say.
In the mean time I'm going to make the fixed one my workhorse iron so I can be somewhat sure that it's working. I think I'm going to try making a 3D printed hand piece that holds both irons as a ghetto talon. - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Classic quantum problem. You changed it by observing it.
those are really hard. especially on cars. fought with quantum hydraulics on my car for years (it was a weak pump, despite what pros were saying), it works fine whenever it wants and when it goes to the worksop.
mechadrake So true. I've been a mechanic for many years and it seems like some car are afraid of being worked on and their problems disappear as soon as they get to the shop.
I’m pretty sure the issue was dirty connects in the power switch and that the constant turning on and off again has cleaned it just enough to alleviate the issue. Might be worth cleaning the switch with some Servisol or similar.
Ahh, another fellow Metcal user :)
Regarding the power switch, these units have quite a strange design concept. The switch does not actually switch the mains. It doesn't even switch the secondary side. Instead, it connects to the internal 18V regulator input, which in turn enables all the remaining circuitry (the switchmode part is always on too).
There is a lot of large bulk capacitance on the inputs and outputs of either regulators or the transsformer, so the rapid flickering points to an issue after the switch. As you can see in the circuit diagram, you get the voltage that goes into the 18V regulator at the transformer, into a 1000µ capacitor, and then into the switch. After that switch, you only have a 100µ cap, and after the regulator, a 10µ cap.
Therefore, i would suspect the switch making intermittent contact, due to wear and tear on the switches contacts. That would also explain the results you see when moving the switch slowly, etc.
Some years ago i created my own RF supply for the Metcal stuff, it was quite some fun to do so. It's on the EEVBlog ("DIY Metcal 13.56 MHz RF Supply"). One of the improvements is that it allows you to change the tips while turned on, and it auto-recovers from the error state :)
Keep an eye on eBay for STTC and SMTC, from time to time you can find sellers that offer new-old-stock cartridges for very little money. Sometimes you also can find a Talon (that's the tweezers for the station) for acceptable money.
Keep an eye out for the STTC-126 cartridge, i really like it. It is a bent fine tip, so you get the best of two worlds: a fine pointy tip to do small solder spots, and if used "sideways", the same effect as a regular flat tip.
What's worth mentioning, because many people moan about stations that do not have the means to adjust the temperature: Solder doesn't care. It always melts at the same temp. The reason people often crank it up is because the iron can't deliver the heat energy (i.e. cooling down to quickly under load). The Metcal stations take mere seconds to recover/adjust to the thermal load. You can use a tip/cartridge meant for SMD work, and happily solder a penny onto a huge copper area without problems. No need to adjust anything :)
Greetings,
Chris
could it have been the main switch? because of the "sparking" noise, and it got better the more you switched it on and off, just an guess
I was thinking the same thing. Maybe moving the switch back and forth dislodged some corrosion or something...
@@Fuzy2K may b carbon in contacts...........
@@shinningraj or dust. Found my old soldering machine's switch filled with dust.
My thought as well.
My money is on the power switch, like the others said. I've had intermitten problems on my car with the power windows not functioning when I use the driver's side control but fine with the other doors. Drove me crazy for a while cos I couldn't wind down my driver's window. Finally took apart the switches and found a bunch of oxidized contact points. Cleaned up with a fine wire brush and electronics spray cleaner, worked fine till the day I sold it 4 years later. My bet is swap out the switch and problem solved.
How much does a Schrodinger's Soldering Iron go for these days? I'm in the market
Maybe the switch is failing or dirty?
Ahh, the soldering station I learned to solder on. :)
I still use it at my ham radio club meetings to get stuff done.
Great video :) I also want to say that I'm extremely happy I found your channel.
Spray some contact cleaner into that switch or replace it, you rocking it back and fourth likely dislodged some carbonation off the contacts. That buzzing sound was arcing.
There was an angry bee in it and you released it.
That is one beefy soldering iron. I need one. I currently have a Weller EC-1002. It’s a nice iron, but it takes a long time to warm up
At first i was leaning towards a bad switch, but then you went and re-flowed some of the solder points in the switchmode section, and after that it was working. my guess would be a cold solder joint in there that you hit. i have had cold solder joints that can be invisible to the naked eye. they can drive you nuts.
This model metcal is so nicely built, not so sure about the new ones though. they look a bit cheap. I love my MX-500.
To be honest your channel is amazing!!
Iestyn Hands To be dishonest, I disagree.
I have the same model unit and I love it, use it all the time opposed to several other irons i own. Mostly because of the fact that it gets hot and ready to use within seconds. However, it recently hasn't been heating up to operating temperatures regardless of the soldering tip i use and I have at least a half dozen tips. Any ideas ?
Couldnt it be the swtich with miss contact or bad connections, or dirt, or corrosion in the switch?
I dont know about the p3's, but the amd durons and athlons may have some issues with recent psu's, as they pull alot of current from the 5v rail. If other people here is planning like me to bring from the dead a old system with a newer psu, its good to check that.
Oxidization in the on/off switch. Playing with it fixed it.
I was about to say the issue could be the power switch but it is already mentioned.
You should have checked the main switch I think it's dirty inside, after actuating it so many times it just eventually scraped the insides enough to make a good contact.
Ok, so why do you need a big station like that if each tip is rated for a specific temperature?
Thank you for the video. Do you know what is the fuse rating? Thank you
Is it true, a metcal unit are useless for micro soldering trace repair since enamel copper wire requires 400c and theres no way to manually crank up the temp to 400c in a metcal unit?
I had same problem but with soviet oscilloscope, i checked almost everything, replaced HV module, PSU transformer...but problem was in faulty power switch.
Metal MX-500? or Metcal MX-500?
Typo in the Title?
All darn it sounds like you wanted a broken one just think of this as a good thing it's always better to have more then less
Nice video as always
The connector is a bog-standard F-connector.
They do make dual channel stations, like the MFR-PS2200 series
I suspect a dirty or bad power switch that you accidentally fixed by switching it off and on so much.
please help i have a model MX-PS 500 geting the error GND Fault !!
you fixed it!
Hey. I own the same station.
immediately after switching on
when you connect the handle through the power meter, you can see that when you remove from the stand, the station does not immediately give all the power, but dials gradually and smoothly (the interval is about 8 seconds). then 1-2 seconds and the warming up of the sting ends. So it should be?
The MX-500 does not put the handset into standby in the stand.
AkBKukU You did not correctly understand me correctly. Question about the power given to the sting. Why does the station not give all the power at once, to increase it gradually? although it seems that for faster heating of the tip, you need to give the maximum power at once.
it looks like a coax jack is used to connect the soldering iron
Im guessing the second one has bad caps or not
I had some eletronics that fixed themselves too. My positivo laptop shorted out when a bolt got loose inside it and falled in the motherboard close to vrms. Even after hours without the battery and the power cable it wouldnt give any signal of life. I've let him connected to the charger for a few minutes looking for some clue of what happened in the web, when a smd component, maybe a resistor maybe a fusistor maybe a capacitor (i have no idea), just started to shine, yeah, it was combusting with a bit of smoke and light! I disconected it out of the charger, and measured the resistance of it, still the same as the other smds that looked like it and were close to it, but it sort of seem to melt the solder and one little part of it. I knew that it was screwed so just for 'fun' i tried to put in the charger again, and it just booted into windows fine, and i played games for hours into it.
This was 4 months ago, and still alive!
I still look for something to explain that.
Siana Gearz It didnt short itself. I removed the under pannel of the laptop it was flipped down in a table, i pressed the powerbutton, and when i saw, there was a screw stuck between some mosfets/vrms (i really dont know) and a huge spark jumped and it turned off. Then what i described before happened. But it wouldnt give any signal of life, only when a smd component near those mosfets got on fire (basically) that the laptop turned on again. The component seems to be fine even tho its visually slitly damaged. I dint know what happened, could be that short you've said. But i think that smd thing held the short that happened in the primary conversion circuit that converted its 19.5v into other voltages (at least i think it is, i wouldnt say any other circuit could make a yellow and big spark like that).
It could be a fuse (with resistive protection, i dont know the right english name, is it fusistor?) from what i read.
Anyway, i wont mess around that motherboard as its perfectly working now with my i5 2450m.
Fusible resistor? Those can only fail open (theoretically), and only ever makes sense to use it in line, so if it did suffer at all, it's unlikely you would still have a working laptop without fixing that one up.
Polyfuse? Unlikely, i mean those recover just from cooling, not by overheating them again.
Eh, i suppose it's always a tradeoff, whether you let it die on its own or kill it by trying to fix it. Who knows, might serve for decades still as is. :P
From what some people explained to me a fusistor (in portuguese), "holds" a short, by resisting and heating up, rather than blowing up as a fuse, when the current goes up, if the short dont stop in the meantime where it was heating, it will eventually break the circuit as a normal fuse. I dont know if thats correct or anything.
If it was a resistor probably it wouldnt turn on, if it is a capacitor, i think i can live without it, if it is a protection component, then i dont plan on shorting it again, i wont even use those interal screws anymore.
Btw, thx for the help. I think i will only replace the smd thing when it breaks again.
Those components you speak of would be polyfuses, they snap sharply into high-resistance when they reach a specific temperature, limiting the current and preventing something else from burning up. They are usually found on the +5V rail (because people plugging cutlery into their USB ports is common enough) and on the battery or high voltage rail.
However the residual current they let through in high-resistance mode must normally be sufficient to not let them heat up much any longer. For this reason they often exhibit cycling behaviour in a short circuit condition, where they first trigger, then release and quickly trigger again. This does not harm them though, at least not on this short timescale - maybe after days or months of torture, not seconds or minutes.
If it isnt a polufuse, i think it is a capacitor, but would a capacitor glow in a yellow color like it was on fire ?
I thought for sure that reflowing those solder joints is what repaired your second Metcal. I'll dig up my Talon, then perhaps we can make a trade or something.
Yeah it was surprisingly just the switch in the end. I also ended up setting up a second bench area for doing assembly for some kits I sell but I might still be interested in a trade or something if you have a metcal talon you aren't using. I haven't come across one yet. I noticed your channel name had "desert" in the name and I think based off a few of your videos you might be in AZ. I am as well in the Chandler area so it might be possible to meet up to exchange something. If you are interested in that, it would be better to email me at akbkuku@akbkuku.com to talk about it more.
@@TechTangents I'll look for my Talon.
@@TechTangents Email sent.
Why does it have so much circuitry if the tips are responsible for controlling the temperature?
Because the tips heats via radiofrecuency. The power supply is a RF generator that also is made with throught hole parts. It needs to be shielded.
Possibly due to cold solder joints.
Sorry I was the like 421, I really wanted to stay at 420 likes but love the vid's man
What is that e-book reader?!
This looks like one of those SGI computers.
Its the power switch. oxidised contacts I was screaming clean the bloody switch
Is this iron still working @AkBKuku ?
I swapped it out to be my main iron after this to make sure it would continue working. It has been flawless.
Đắt tiền mà lại khoá nhiệt độ theo loại mũi thì đúng là hút máu người dùng.
It's the main switch. A little Deoxit will fix this once and for all.
I call this lucky fix.
It's the Xbox series x but soldering iron
lol who needs hot tweezers just use to soldering irons >__
You can't use both at the same time though, unless you have 2 stations.
typo in the title, Metcal. It says metal
If you look online, pretty much every company and eBay listing calls them Metcal. Amazon, Mouser, and Newark all call the brand Metcal.
Metcal is METAL! ;) read with metal solo growl
Power switch.
I don’t know much about soldering
Having to change tips just to avoid recalibration sounds like more effort than its worth when needing multiple temperatures on one project, having to wait for a tip to cool before changing it over.
Having two hand sets does help...But its still nothing like a decent temperature controlled iron.
Why wait to change tips? It comes with a silicone pad to grab hot tips with.
Imagine you have 10 of these in a lab and needed to have all of them calibrated. If it takes a half hour for each one, that's going to be 5hrs of labor for a likely high-paid technician. Then you would probably have to repeat this every six months. www.circuitnet.com/experts/87161.html
Or, just throw out the tips every six months(or longer) and buy new ones for $20-30 each.
You usually don't need to change tips with these things, pick the temperature you're comfortable with kiiping your parts at and then pick the shape that transfers the proper heat to the part. And you're good.
@@junits15 Until something expensive dies and you have to prove that it wasn't using too hot of an iron that killed it. Sometimes its easier to just cover your ass. Ofc this is in a corporate environment but this is like what these are made for.
i had metcal mx-500 and the problem was the swtich
Hi
I think that noise you heard inside was actually a hard drive seeking, and the light was an activity indicator.
This is the most complicated soldering iron i ever see.... I stick with my 60 watts resistor do...
How can this soldering station be any good? Instead of replacing worn tips you have to replace it with the heating element which makes it more expensive than just the tip. Also the heating element is wearing down prematurly due to not cooling it off before cutting power to it.
Three ic on aluminium, name ??? Please ic name
Second
i will pay for the shipping sending to me please
búg a trafó. na bumm.
First
Okkkk , how will you use such an expensive solder station if the company go out of business and you can't buy any more tips?
What kind of ridiculously massive donkey box is this? It's huge and hideous. Next video! lol