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Serious question, did I waste $240 on a hot air rework station or did it pay for itself?
I repair cameras out of my basement in Boise and last spring I dropped $240 on a hot air rework station for SMD work, mostly to stop cooking ribbon cable connectors with my iron. Three weeks later a customer brought in a water damaged Canon EOS R with a corroded power board, and that station saved the whole job instead of me handing back a brick. Before that I turned away two board level jobs in one week because I had no safe way to lift chips without tearing pads. So now I'm curious, what did you all spend on rework gear before it finally paid for itself, and was there anything you bought that just sat there collecting dust?
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sanchez.mary15h ago
Boy, calling a $240 tool buy "serious" is a stretch. You answered your own question in the post: it saved a Canon EOS R power board and got you two jobs you would have turned down. That's not a mystery, that's just math. The real question is whether you're fooling yourself about how often you'll use it. I know guys who bought a rework station, used it twice, and now it holds down a shelf next to the oscilloscope they never learned to run. You clearly had jobs waiting, so yeah, it paid for itself. But "serious"? Come on, it's a tool that does what tools do.
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