Unable to resist yet another gadget, I bought a soldering tip polisher. Someone please save me from myself…
The tip polisher costs about fifty bucks. There’s a lot of plastic in the construction of the product, but it seems to work. It has two rotating brushes, driven by a small belt and a 12VDC motor. Some high resolution pictures of the tip polisher are shown below:
Aoyue 128, connected to my PSU to measure power consumption
Here’s some pictures of me cleaning my soldering iron tip:
Soldering tip, before cleaning
Soldering tip, after cleaning and plating
As you can see, it did a decent job of cleaning up what was a fairly cruddy soldering iron tip. The motor draws about 730ma while free running, or about 950ma if I stall it by shoving my finger into the brushes. The included 2A switching power supply should be sufficient.
Would I buy it again, if I had it to do over? I suppose so. It’s not an expensive tool, and it does do a reasonable job of cleaning the tip.
