Reviewing the HBTool HB-019 Desoldering Iron: It Probably Won’t Shock You

Author: Jenny List / Source: Hackaday

This unholy lovechild of a cheap solder sucker and an even cheaper soldering iron is the HBTool HB-019 desoldering iron. It came to me for the princely sum of five pounds ($7). So for somewhere between the cost of a pint of foaming ale and the pub’s pie and mash I’d eat alongside it, what had I got?

Regular Hackaday readers will be familiar with my penchant for ordering cheap tools and other electronic gizmos from the usual suppliers of Far Eastern tech, and subjecting them to review for your entertainment and edification. Sometimes the products are so laughably bad as to be next-to-worthless, other times they show enough promise to be of use, and just occasionally they turn out to be a genuine diamond in the rough, a real discovery. This is no precious stone, but it still makes for an entertaining review.

The Mystery is in the Power Cord

Fresh from the pack, the HB-019 in all its glory.

Taking the unit out of its blister pack, I had what looked like a slightly chunky take on a cheap iron, but with the plunger of a solder sucker protruding from the end of its handle where you would normally expect the power cord to be. The cord in turn came from the side of the handle near its business end. At the tip of the element, instead of the normal soldering bit there was a wide nozzle with a roughly 3mm (1/8″) hole in its end.

The cord is 3A twin-core, with no earth conductor. There is no regulatory information on the iron itself or on the box that I could find after a Chinese translating session with Google Translate, so it was in question whether or not the unit was double-insulated.

The brown and blue live and neutral wires were just visible through the narrow gap between the element base plate and the handle, so I suspect that the unit wouldn’t qualify as such. Undoing the three screws revealed that they immediately passed into heatproof insulated shrouding to connect to the element.