JBC Soldering Station On A Budget

A Handmade JBC T245 Compatible Soldering Controller lashed to my desoldering station with a chain of red cable management straps.  The screen is a little difficult to read in the image because of a camera sync disagreement, but in person it looks great.  Also pictured is the official JBC T245-A handle resting awkwardly in my Radio Shack soldering iron stand.

After recently performing a DCHDMI install, prepping for a couple of Wii Dual installs and watching citrus300psi's install videos, I noticed the soldering iron Dan Kunz was using was very different from the irons I've used pretty much the entire time I've been doing soldering projects.  The grip was much closer to the tip allowing better precision of movement, the heat seemed to be better spread throughout the iron etc... So I reached out to him and asked him about his equipment.

His iron and station were made by a company called JBC.  They make quite a lot of professional grade soldering equipment.  Thing is it's all very expensive.  I'm not saying that there aren't more expensive higher-end tools to be had, but the absolute rock bottom price you're going to pay for a basic JBC soldering station is around $500 (with tax and shipping it's pretty much never going to be less than that).  Occasionally used ones pop up on Ebay but while I was shopping around even the used ones were close to $400 and there were precious few available.

I looked at the "handle" component which you can buy separately for about $60 to $70 and didn't look close enough.  I thought that because the pins on the connector looked, at a glance, the same as my X-Tronic soldering and hot-air station that the JBC handle would probably plug right in to it.  So I bought a handle and a tip for just over $100 thinking that I'd save myself the expense of an entire JBC station.

JBC T245 Handle

Well when it arrived I realized my mistake - the connectors are similar but they are definitely not compatible with what I've come to think of as a "standard" soldering iron socket.

At that point I was invested so I went back to the idea of trying to find a used station.  After searching for a while I stumbled across a few open-source projects on github which provided instructions for assembling your own JBC-compatible "controller".  (Example)

As much as I enjoy DIY projects, trying to build a soldering station from plans is a bit outside my area of interest.  But I figured someone who was into that kind of thing might be building and selling them.   That's when I stumbled across Soguklehim on Tindie.

An excellent hand made JBC T245 compatible soldering controller.

One of the things that struck me as interesting was the fact that this controller is DC powered.  You have to provide an external DC power source - he doesn't sell them directly, unless you count the adapter that lets you plug the controller into your car's cigarette lighter socket.  Soguklehim also offers a couple optional "modules", a reverse-polarity guard, and an upgrade for use with specific high-amp, low voltage batteries.  I opted to go with the reverse-polarity guard and curiosity drove me to also spring for the car adapter because I do have a soldering project in my truck that would be a little more convenient if all I had to do was just carry the station out there and plug it in.

The seller/maker, Hazar, was very responsive to questions and was happy to provide a lot of technical information when asked.  It's clear that this is a passion project for him.

All told the controller was about a $120 investment.  So at this stage I was in for about $230.

Note: I believe these are made on demand, so as soon as I bought the controller the item went into "sold out" status, but within a couple of days it was showing back in stock.

According to the documentation the T245 handles can try to draw up to 200 Watts of power.  You can use the station with less-powerful supplies - in fact there are internal settings you can use to limit power draw and prevent overheating smaller supplies, but I wanted to make sure to get something that would let me use it to the fullest.  According to the designer, smaller power supplies will just result in taking longer to reach the target temperature.

I initially assumed (wrongly) that it would be easy to find something like a laptop power brick rated for 200 Watts or better, but actually finding one turned out to be the most arduous part of this whole thing.  There are plenty of laptop power supplies in the rated range but they cost anywhere from $100 to $200 - which would completely defeat the purpose of my "budget" JBC soldering station.

My search started on Amazon, ranged all across the Internet before it wound up circling back to Amazon after I had learned to refine my search terms to hone in on exactly what was needed.

Eventually I found this 24V 10AMP power supply (Watts are Volts x Amps so 240 Watts) designed for driving huge runs of LED lights.  It also happened to have the exact 5.5x2.5mm barrel plug needed to fit into the controller

Generic 24V 10AMP (240 Watt) Power Supply for LED arrays.

At $40 the power supply put my grand total at $270.  Not cheap, but still nearly half the cost of the real thing.


I was reluctant to place an order to Turkey for a soldering controller just because I had no idea whether I was going to end up having to pay import tariffs or customs fees or anything goofy like that, and because the Post Office seems to delight in demolishing the stuff I buy from across the ocean.

Twenty days after placing my order, this is what arrived.  The fact that the postman could hand this to my wife without hanging his head in shame astounds me.  He just muttered something about it being customs' fault, shrugged his shoulders and handed it to her.

The hilariously mangled package my controller arrived in

Fortunately the seller's work is pretty sturdy and the station arrived none the worse for wear.

I finally got a chance to use it this weekend and I have to say I'm very impressed.

My T245 handle plugged right in, the power supply worked perfectly, and the tip heats up almost instantly.  I'm not exaggerating when I say it goes from room temperature to 700 degrees Fahrenheit in about a second.

The JBC handle and tips (they call them "cartridges") are so nice to work with - every bit as precise and comfortable as they look.  They heat uniformly all the way out to the tip, and they hold the heat better than what I'm used to working with - not getting pulled down as quickly or as much when touched to something with a large ground plane or other dense heat-absorbent material.  (My guess is that this is the purpose of that buldge in the shaft). This was definitely worth the effort.  I'm going to have a hard time ever going back to my old iron.

The station works exactly as advertised.  I really couldn't be more pleased.  It has a ton of great features.  About the only disadvantages between this and the "real thing" are:

1) It doesn't include a holder for the iron, and thus can't take advantage of the feature on official JBC stations that places the iron in low power mode when the iron is inserted into the holder.  However, the designer did add in software for this feature, so using it simply requires wiring up a momentary switch to detect when the iron is in a holder. Right now I don't have a suitable holder for the JBC handle - I'm using my 25-year-old general purpose Radio Shack soldering iron holder, but he handle is so slender, if I'm not careful it will slip right through the other side of the coil and onto my workbench.  But when you factor in the cost of a new holder, wiring and a momentary switch, the savings dwindles a little more.

2) The controller is extremely small and light.  This makes it very portable, but the cord movement from manipulating the handle is enough to make the thing slide all over my workbench.  Not a tough problem to solve, though.  I just used some extra cable management straps to lash it to my de-soldering station.

So while I wouldn't exactly call this a "cheap" solution, it's certainly a "cheapER" way to get access to JBC's excellent handles and tips.

If I was doing this professionally rather than just as a hobby, I would buy an official JBC station in a heartbeat, but as a hobbyist I found this to be a great alternative way to try out JBC's hardware and keep a little over two hundred dollars in my pocket in the process.