Modding A HaKlone 853D 3-in-1 Soldering Station

[iamdarkyoshi]

Made some mods to my soldering station today, mostly to the cooling. This is a three in one unit, and the bench supply is really shitty. It is a single tap transformer linear supply, so anything that is not going to the load is dissipated as heat. So with a ~24v transformer and a max rated 15v output at 1A, if I am powering something at 12v, the other 12v has to be wasted as heat. This goes into the power transistor which is what regulates voltage. The power transistor does not really have its own heatsink, its just bolted to the chassis. I was using it today to charge a 12v battery at 1A and after half an hour, the entire thing was too hot to touch and was making hot smells.

 

I opened it up to see if I could mount a heatsink on the power transistor and HOLY MOTHER OF GABEN IS THAT TRANSFORMER HOT. So not only do I need to cool the transistor, I also need some air across the transformer. It has vents in the bottom where the transformer is, so I cut a hole and added a fan on the back. I also added a CPU heatsink on the back where the power transistor is.

 

This supply has an overcurrent cutoff at 1.5A, so the absolute worst case scenario is a short circuit and a current of 1.5A, dissipating roughly 36W in the power transistor and putting a fairly hefty load on the transformer.

 

So I did.

 

After about 10 minutes, nothing was over 50 degrees. Issue solved!

 

 

 

 

I plan to update this thread with more mods tomorrow if you guys are interested!

[Hackentosher]

No pics of the progress and guts? Cool project though, probably extended the lifetime on that thing.

[iamdarkyoshi]

4 minutes ago, Hackentosher said:

No pics of the progress and guts? Cool project though, probably extended the lifetime on that thing.

I will show them tomorroa. I have some mods to make, need to add (and find a scrap) LM7805/LM7905 so the damn fan stays steady under load

[Huntsman]

Converting it into a SMPS would be a better solution I think. Modules can be found on ebay for less than 5 bucks..

[iamdarkyoshi]

7 minutes ago, Huntsman said:

Converting it into a SMPS would be a better solution I think. Modules can be found on ebay for less than 5 bucks..

Not sure on this. Its got several voltage rails total, the transformer also powers the logic and soldering iron, and the iron runs on A/C. 

 

Also @Hackentosher I have gotten some work done, but I need a regulated voltage for the fan. Gonna break into my collection of linear voltage regulators I guess

[Huntsman]

8 minutes ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

Not sure on this. Its got several voltage rails total, the transformer also powers the logic and soldering iron, and the iron runs on A/C. 

I think this could work, since the linear regulators work on DC too.

[Hackentosher]

Lit, I should probably pay attention to history rn, but ltt

 

[Sharon24]

if i take a laptop charger at 19v 3.5A and step down it to voltages i need it will give more current?