MILWAUKEE M12 Soldering Iron - It's HOT but is it TOO HOT?
A battery-powered soldering iron sounds like a good idea. Our homemade efforts failed to impress the eFIXX viewers, so they suggested we check out the Milwaukee M12 Soldering Iron.
Looks heavy but what does it feel like when trying to solder LED strip?
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Milwaukee M12 Battery Powered Soldering Iron
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🕐 TIME STAMPS 🕕
00:00 Soldering time with the Milwaukee M12 SI
00:27 Is it better than our TS100?
01:00 Uses Milwaukee M12 battery system
01:13 Lighter than it looks with adjustable head
02:20 Tinning wires using the angled head
04:07 Soldering LED Strip (led tape)
06:49 Using the third-hand jig
08:00 Changing the tip
09:00 Heat uptime
11:30 What do we think?
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📹 Presented by
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#efixx #electricians #milwaukeetools
Great video guys and thanks for setting it up. Liking the 'third hand' stand too. I doubt though that you would be using something this costly in the workshop, pre-soldering your LED strips. However, I can see its usefulness on site. Of course, you can always use it as an extra torch to look for the Wiha slimBit that you dropped...
Better with fine tip rather than chisel one. Used to soldering as was a tv engineer for 30 years. Once tinned just need heat and no more solder, neater joints, my led joints are neat
I love mine, it spends most of its time sat on a 4 or 6 ah battery. Never had the iron run a battery down yet and I've used it for some heavy joints on umbilical cables. Not sure if the stand is really up to the task, maybe use some back to back unistrut to increase the strength. Lol.
Nice bit of kit if you do a lot of soldering . But over priced for some thing you might use once in a wile . I will stick to my mains powers one . Great video guy’s as always 👍❤️⚡️
NOTE: After a lot of research on the M12 solder iron, buyer beware: Anything over 3ah CP batteries and ~10 min of run time will start to deteriorate and melt the housing cap of the solder wand. There are literally hundreds of 1 star reviews claiming this issue, rendering this device useless after only a few months of use. That said, I am still buying one, but limiting my usage to ~10 min on before cooldown and only using compact batteries. One guy I found did this consistently and was able to put hundreds of hours of use on this device over the course of several years. God bless!
Taught to solder for electronics many years ago - if I had melted or deformed the end of the insulation on the wire it would have failed quality control. Was also taught to tin a lot longer lenght of wire and take the excess solder to the end and then cut it to the length required. Should be able to see individual strands of wire covered in solder.
There is a thermal fuse with a cutoff of 152°c. If you're an owner who uses it quite a bit and it suddenly won't heat anymore, its most likely that fuse right below and inline with the heating element. Order a new thermal fuse, take the iron apart and replace the fuse (Don’t heat that fuse too much when you solder it on). This tool is very handy, but it gets pretty hot using the 3 or 4 amp hour batteries getting that fuse to cut-off. Stick with the small battery and you should be good. Hope that helps some owners.
The thermal fuse blows even with the small batteries, this tool seems to have a 100% failure rate
@pcb1962 I'm finding the failure rate of the m12 rotary tool is about the same. This would be my second time replacing the schottky diode and voltage regulator (replaced both last time). Time of use before failure is about 1-2hours of total use on that rotary tool.
love mine and use it every day, no more plugging in for me again, run it on a 2ah and works spot on
What do you use it for?
@@efixx building led strips for student housing,never had any issues at all
I don't know from a electrician perspective but IMO ts100 with a good power bank would be best, and the power bank can be also used to charge the headlight and stuff
👍
Mine only last about a hr give or take, but definitely handy the quick heat up and being cordless is 👌, plus its got a torch built in who doesn't love a gadget with a built in torch
Everything has a torch 🔦
@@efixx that's it what doesn't,
Can’t beat a gas soldering iron with a see through gas tank and far better adjustment IMO
Agreed. Good thing about a gas soldering iron, refill and go no waiting to recharge batteries , plus mine doubles up as a heat gun , for heat shrink
I know you are using solder with a flux core but a little no clean flux dabbed on the bare pads & on the end of the wires before hand will help that solder flow no end. I buy leaded solder which melts at a far lower temp than lead free so I only need to heat my iron up to 280C. Trust me flux is your friend if you want perfect solder joins.
Have one fot years, does work good and has nice feel to it. Looks bulky but has a really good feel. The only minor thing is that you cant set the temp. to your own choice.
Temp settings would be a great feature
@@efixx a digital one and a red warning light somewhere on it for when it's above a certain temperature, knock that over without realising and the curtains might be gone!
Has Gary got a new grip for handy cam.
The problem with an over temerature iron is that it burns the flux up too quickly and you end up with crappy joints that don't flow - sort of in the way you experienced. Even worse with the lead free crap. If you are doing more agricultural work this won't matter but for components that are temperature sensitive it will as you've discovered you'll cook 'em
Disadvantage for this kind of iron that uses the fixed heater and interchangeable tips, there isn’t a good thermal connection between the white heater and the tip itself so you do lose a lot of the potential maximum power output, the ts100 has the heater built into the removable tip and so the heat control and heat up time is far better. This is why the ts100 produced a better joint, upon touching the tip to the very large copper traces on the LED tape, it sucked a lot of heat from the tip but since the heater has a good thermal connection to the tip, a lot of the heat generated gets efficiently transferred to the tip rather than being lost because the heater is not touching the iron tip like in the Milwaukee’s case.
Great input 👍
Keep in with the black and all in with the red nothing in this game for a melted led
We had a super time Jim 😂😂😂
How is the availability of the tips?
Seem to be various types available via Amazon
Looks like a nice tool but looks a bit awkward to hold for any long periods of time, seems too thick! I’d be interested to know how hot it gets, and how fast Coming from an electrical engineer rather than an electrician, I tend to prefer something with more head options, and variable heat; but then again if you’re soldering some LED wire every now and again I’m sure it’ll be ok!
400c within 18 seconds
You can change the solder tip and it's actually comfortable to hold (for me that is). Not a bad tool to have as a quick back up.
Bit bulky I think
200k by the end of the year
Thanks for the support 👍🏻
It's one of the worst purchases I've regretted. It stopped working the 2nd time I used it. It was sent off during warranty and low and behold broke again. Avoid, Avoid, Avoid. I ended up selling it for spares or repairs on Ebay. There were numerous others also being sold for spares.
We still prefer our TS100
Idk why this guys dont use flux that its going to come off i was surprise that thing got solder without flux not the right way to solder any way
The wire is flux cored