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Dropped $400 on a Hakko soldering station in 2009 and it outlasted three shops
Back when I was fixing point and shoots out of a spare room in my house, I was using a $15 iron from the hardware store. It ate tips every two weeks and one day it cooked a flex cable on a customer's Canon because the temp swung wild. So I walked into a supply shop in Burbank and paid $400 for a Hakko FX-888 with a spare tip set, which felt insane at the time. That thing is still on my bench 16 years later, same tips, and it has paid for itself maybe 40 times over. The old timers kept saying buy once cry once, and I rolled my eyes, but they were not wrong. What is the one tool you overpaid for that ended up being the best money you ever put on the bench?
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river32017d ago
Mine was a Fluke 87V I grabbed off a guy on Craigslist for $180 back in like 2012, thought I was nuts for not buying the cheap $40 meter but that thing has never once let me down on a diode or continuity check. The cheap one before it gave me a reading that was off by like 0.3 volts and I chased a dead board for two days because of it. Buy once cry once is real, the cheap stuff just makes you pay in time and headaches instead of cash.
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