Hi welcome to Ted down Tuesday I thought I'd take apart my JBC soldering IR here which I've had for quite some time. Yes, I've been meaning to do a review of it and I will get around to that but I thought we just have a look and see what's inside. Yeah it's going to be a linear Transformer and a little controller. but anyway, um it could be interesting to see what the build quality is like cuz this is a first class uh quality solder in IR like 350 $400 worth JBC top brand name and this is from uh, Metronics in Australia who uh supplied this uh for me? they're the official uh suppliers here.

Anyway, awesome iron I Love it! You've seen it in quite a few uh videos in uh, recent times. it's my main iron now. I've uh, pretty much ditched my um hoo solder in Iron cuz this one is simply brilliant from a thermal capacity uh, point of view I Really love it. It's awesome and this is the Uh.

The model is the CD 2bb I Believe that the 2sb is like the different Uh voltage version. This is fixed 230 uh volts. Of course it's a linear Transformer I Don't expect it to have like a tap inside or anything like that. It's made in the EU there it is brilliant.

We got a uh ground here for an ESD uh wrist strap and I don't really like the sort of uh, cheap ass uh D type plastic connector they got here I don't know for this quality Iron I Would have expected like a metal one, but eh, whatever. Anyway, it's a really awesome iron. I won't bother powering up. uh, you've uh, seen it before? no I won't take it.

Yeah, it's not, that's the hot end folks, but hasn't been turned on. Um I won't take apart the iron itself cuz that will almost, uh, certainly have to, uh, you know, completely rip that apart and uh, damage it And this is my main iron. so I don't want to do that but this puppy we can certainly take apart. so let's do that.

And of course it has. As you've seen in previous videos, it has the auto Sens in so as soon as this metal on the iron tip makes contact with the metal in here, it instantly, uh, shuts it down and uh, puts it in a um, like a lower temperature mode to save the tip. a tip saving mode. As soon as you take it out, it instantly warms up in like under a second up to your designated uh temperature.

Fantastic! And also so expect to see some sort of sensoring here. That's why it's all fixed and doesn't have a separate um, in fact, never taken this off. Must be a wire in there or something. Let's have a look.

is there? There's got to be. It's going to make a full out of me. Yep, there we go there we go. The iron's falling off, but yeah, there we go.

We have the wire in there, which uh can sense just a single wire that can, uh, obviously the common um uh internal and uh, that can sense that it's making contact there. So that's why you don't get this as a separate. it's sort of not available as a separate station. uh which I much prefer I don't like the integrated uh holders as much as I like the Standalone ones like you get on the heo and others.

Um, that could take me a while to put that back in. Oh, have I broken it? I don't know. Anyway, let's crack it open and on the bottom of the unit. here.

we got uh, four screws there. standard Phillips looks like it's uh, just going to pop off in halves like that. This screw here is uh Dome release and that I've never taken that out but that is a dome release. Well, they call it a dome but it's to get ACC it's to change your um tip cleaning nut steel, wool in there.

very nice so you can. There you go, you can just, uh, clean all that. brilliant. install a new one.

oh I'm getting little bits, cruddy bits of solder everywhere unfortunately. but let's open this thing up. and uh, now the thing with these. um, an iron.

oh that's tight. An iron like this compared to a uh, sort of like an old style hoo for example is that uh, well, you know it's got like an LCD It's got like a microcontroller in there and everything else. It's like, you know. So if you expect these things to last, you know, 30 years like or 25 years I think my current hoo has been going.

it probably be still be going for another 25 whether or not something like this which is more complex electronically then um, you know, especially like the LCD You know, is that still going to work in 25 30 years time? I Don't know I wouldn't bet on it compared to you know your traditional simple temperature control IR which just has a Uh linear Transformer this one's got a linear Transformer as well. of course. um, but I would expect the much simpler ones to have a greater lifespan, but anyway I would trade it I Really love the functionality of this thing so it's absolutely brilliant as we no doubt see in a review. But here we go.

Let's uh, pop the hood I'm assuming it's just going to pop off, but that wire will still be attached up here somewhere. So let's Tada There's our Transformer got a couple of flat Flex Oh right, the flex right goes up to look at that. That's nice brilliant look at that. They we got a um a nice like it's like a holder.

It's like a holder for the Uh linear power transformer there. that is very nice. Rather impressed by that. And then we got our flat Flex cables.

They're actually soldered directly into there. They're not. uh, there's no. there's no connector there.

You can see that they're uh, soldered directly in, but they're terminated very nicely. I Like that. That's very impressive I Think think we're going to have to. Well, yeah, how do I get that out? I might have to I can see the circuitry down in there and oh, oh, there we go.

Look at that back panel just lifts out. Lovely. Beautiful. Oh, look at that.

Check it out. there we go. Beautiful little uh, sort of, uh, plastic boots on the back of those back of those connectors. That's lovely and uh, to go up to the switch and then that just goes into the Transformer Pretty darn basic, let me tell you.

and um, all of the current for the Uh element of course is running through that flat flex. but uh, it's you know. I think it's pretty beefy. it's obviously more than adequate for the job.

And then we've got our Um Earth as well going from the mains input here, going directly up to the main board up there. I Don't think it goes through to the um, actual uh I itself where you can't actually see it so going through so that uh tip is obviously isolated from Earth. Well actually, I was wrong on that I've never actually measured this iron yet. but no, look, it is connected directly through to Main's Earth there I've got the meter going through to the Earth terminal on the back and there you go.

The tip is grounded, so just be careful when you're soldering things folks. you can, uh, short stuff out if you have to solder live uh circuits. If you're you know, doing uh, battery, you know you're replacing one of those batteries in a um, you know, a HP 3478a or something like that and you try and uh, solder. the thing.

Whoops. Be very careful when your circuits Main's Earth referenced as well. You can get in big trouble, but there you go. Um, it didn't look like it.

Um, based on the fact that the earth goes up here and then goes all the way through the ribbon all the way up to the top board and then must come back to obviously get in that connector. unless there's a trace on the probably might be a trace on the bottom side. that could be a double-sided board. Well, could they have chosen bigger, beefier screws to screw this transformer into place? I Don't think so.

Brilliant. And the Transformer I guess that's the brand uh Crow Visa Never heard of it, but uh, looks very, very nice. And of course the uh, the lamination looks absolutely brilliant on it. I Don't hear any uh Transformer hum out of this thing.

Of course you wouldn't expect it from a top quality Iron Like this and it is very nice. The secondary, uh, there it is. 23.5 Vol and 12 vol of course. uh, 230 volts only.

So don't go buying an iron from a different country thinking that you can, uh, modify it, change the taps or whatever for a different uh uh voltage main system, you're just not going to be able to do it and made in the UE huh? doesn't make sense but that's actually made in the EU that's actually just um, uh Union de Europe if I'm pronouncing that correctly and so there you go. That's a very nice uh Transformer they've got uh, they got some foam on top of that to hold it in place. Nice attention to detail. I'm really liking this.

There you go, You can actually see the two wires there. uh, one's going off to that um uh, to the Uh tip holder or the iron holder and the other's going to the tip replacer which I didn't actually show this one up here that also has Auto sensing. So you can actually quickly replace the Uh tips in this thing. If the the idea is that you, it's not the best.

but the idea is that you get your in there and it as soon as it touches there. it automatically cuts the power and you can remove your tip like that and then you can fast replace tips. That's the idea and it does actually work. I've uh, actually used it and it does work a treat.

So they've got the two uh, cut off wires going down in there and I see a microchip pick down in there some more uh flat Flex Obviously going over to the Um LCD on the front, see a nice big Big Dale current shunt fuse. Let's get this board out. There's our main board. There's only one board uh in this thing.

It contains all the Uh power control Power switching and the Uh processing and display stuff as well. We got a Uh chip on board uh, chip on glass sorry, um LCD up here. blue backlight. That's very nice.

Of course, there we go. We got our rubber membrane Keys down there. oh, they don't I better actually stick those back in there so that they line properly when I put it back and uh, lots of heavy V stitching here. really high current stuff of course.

uh, going from our Um input over here because the Transformer tap of course as you saw all the Uh Transformer Taps down here. So all the current from the Transformer and the iron? what is this? 150 odd odd watt iron or something like that, so you know, um, some reasonably heavy currents here, but they have no problem flowing through the very thick uh copper clearly inside the flat Flex There, it's not just ordinary flat Flex It would be specified for a fairly High current, so that's all she wrote on the bottom of the board. No other components. something of note down in there.

you'll see that to uh, put this window in here, which is, um, feels like proper Glass By the way, Yeah, I think that's uh, definitely glass there. They've actually uh, heat. uh, you know, uh, heat welded that in place so that's not uh, coming out anytime soon. Nice.

And of course, it makes sense to have a glass plate in there cuz the last thing you want is for your hot iron. um, to accidentally fall onto your Uh LCD screen down there and just instantly burn through any polycarbonate or any other plastic type material. So glass going to work. A treat.

Brilliant touch. And there's the main control board. I'll show you some closeups of some chips in the minute, but uh, it looks very, very well solded, very well assembled, very well designed. You can see all that heavy V stitching all around some components.

heavy components there, obviously mosfets down in there. You can tell by the Uh pin out, all the pins are shorted together there and there and uh, well. one side, four and then three. and then the gate pin over there and we'll have a look at the microchip microcontroller.

We''ve got ourselves a four terminal current shunt here. Dale Top quality brand. Of course they're the pins there. We go.

going into a Op07 Precision Op Amp another Op07 There we've got ourselves a a fixed PCB surface mount fuse. There, it's not socketed SMD type. there's another large wattage 10 milliohm current shunt resistor up there and uh, so we got some 22 ohms here and then a sneaky little bugger. we've got a one Meg there so that's obviously using as as a high voltage uh resistor.

There couple of discret transistors large, nice large uh foot uh prints on here for the uh passive components. really quite like it I'll get in there off the macro lens and we'll see the quality of the soldering. but I think you'll find that it's uh, absolutely first class. As you'd expect, you can see some of the soldering up close there, even that huge um four terminal current sh resistor.

lot of thermal mass in that lot of thermal mass in the Uh Vs and the ground. You know well, the large current traces attached to that solded absolutely beautifully. as are all of the passives. and the S so8 perfect amount of solder.

perfect F uh fillets on there Oppo 7 Lm358 another Oppo 7 and we a couple of devices over here. 3 H7 it looks like uh, opto couplers of some sort. Then our power mosfets over there. sort of bog standard 4470 is you know, 40 volt n channel uh devices fairly beefy and that looks like a L 4931 low Dropout voltage regulator There we got some surface mount electrolytics I don't know what uh brand they are I'm not going to bother to uh look them up.

really not a huge deal. We've got our Um speaker down there and we've got our header. that's our microchip. um IC SP programming interface and we have oh I Didn't expect a DS pick? There you go.

Dspic 33 FJ 256 Fair bit of horsepower in this thing. um why it needs a DSP instead of a uh regular um, you know, microchip pick I don't know running at a lousy 4 MHz there by the looks of it. but uh, there you go. didn't expect that at all and a 24 C16 external E prom.

wonder what they're using uh that for instead of uh, you know, or Cali ation data or something like that? um, instead of the Uh using the internal in the DS Pi I Don't know. but um, apparently I think the new model actually has a USB port on it. By the way, this one doesn't. Yes, I just went and checked that and uh, yes, the latest uh B model does have a USB port on the uh back of it.

and of course this one doesn't So um, uh, whether or not you know that's the interface connector for that I don't know Pro It could even be a completely different Uh board layout for the new model. Not entirely sure if anyone's got the latest model with the USB Um, please post some photos and we can do some Uh comparisons. There's a jumper link there I don't want to pull that I might lose my uh, you know, cow dat, it might reset it or do something weird like that and well, that's the thing right. with a solar in iron that requires this much uh, complexity and firmware.

and USB updating and driving the LCD screen. It's got all the fonts and everything else. dot matrix screen. uh, you know there's a lot of code in this and that's a lot of code to go wrong.

I mean that's an infinite amount of more code to go wrong and lock up. uh, or potentially lock up. Um, compared to like your basic dumbass I Am with your analog control Loop So you know, look. I've had no problems with it.

There's no reported, uh, problems at all. Um, they obviously, uh, design this. uh, quite well. The layout's quite.

uh, you know, it's like ground. It looks like there's a decent well there. It looks like there is a decent ground plane all under there. but you got to take you know Emi into account.

you don't want, um, you know, to, you know, external noise to interfere with this thing and lock up your solder in iron and go to maximum temperature or whatever. You know it's got to be fairly foolproof. and I'm sure they've really done their uh homework. JBC One of the, uh, best brand irons on the market.

but um, yeah. I don't know. bloody software. And of course, one of the really, uh, neat things about this iron is that it really does have a um, well, I believe it has a temperature sensor thermocouple you know, built right into the tip.

That's why it's actually got three uh terminals there and it actually gives you the uh tip temperature display um in uh, real time directly on the LCD on the front panel so that's fantastic. So yeah, what else can I say really apart from this thing? um yes, this will be one of the quickest uh tear Downs in a long time. I think there's there's not much in it, but it is beautifully made. I must say I am uh, very impressed.

It is uh, first class uh Qu. design, quality and construction exactly what I uh expected in such a topnotch uh unit. So yeah, um, that really has um uh in even you know greatly increased my uh confidence in the uh JBC brand. I really do like them.

As I said. I've been using this uh thing for uh, quite a few months now and and you've seen in a couple of videos and well, it is really an awesome iron. It really is worth every cent. Yeah, it's expensive, but oh man I just love it.

Really? Do so. Anyway, that is the JBC taken apart All In Pieces sorry um that's the JBC uh Cd2 BB soldering station and there you go. That's all there is to it. If you want to discuss it, jump on over to the E blog forum and if you like tear down Tuesday Please give it a big thumbs up.

sorry this one's a little bit. uh, short today I've actually got a bugger off. It's 5:21 p.m. Yes! I Always say that.

Got to go to my strata meeting. Yay! Great fun and uh there you go CD 2bb thank you very much JBC Love it! Quality Control Tested! Thanks for that. Catch you next time! Um.