ElectronicsNMore sent over this great product review on our Quick Charge Pro Model #7700 cordless soldering iron. Throughout his review he shows how to upgrade the soldering iron to an LED bulb rather than the incandescent bulb we currently use. He also upgraded the iron to have the indicator light to show the iron was receiving a charge.
Check out of Quick Charge 7700 Iron here! This iron’s features include:
- Fully recharges in 3.5 to 4.0 hours
- Partially charged battery to full capacity in one to two hours
- Up to 125 soldering joints per charge during continuous use
- Withstands high-rate charging without damage
The Quick Charge Soldering Iron Kit is the world’s #1 rechargeable soldering iron kit designed with the professional in mind. The 7700 cordless soldering iron kit is our basic unit and the biggest seller for a good reason. We like to think of it as the “crank up window” of our soldering irons. It’s dependable, bullet proof and has an easy battery charge. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles our other models feature, but it gets the job done and done well. The 7700 soldering iron kit fully recharges in 4 hours and outputs 125 solder joints per charge.
For more information about our model #7700 cordless soldering iron, click here to visit our product page.
Check out the review below and his YouTube channel for more great information! Thanks ElectronicsNMore!
Although I like the idea of adding an LED to let you know when the iron is correctly seated in the charger, I prefer installing it as part of a 5V USB modification to the charging stand base instead of the iron itself. There is more room for it there and it allows me to use one base to charge up multiple irons (yes, I have a few). I think that the Model 7700 soldering iron is an engineering masterpiece and doesn’t need any improvement, so any tweaking should be limited to the charger.
I also don’t subscribe to the philosophy that everything incandescent needs to be “upgraded” to LED. The “Joule Thief” circuit is a lot to cram inside this iron (especially the ferrite bead) and overly complicates a beautifully simple and exquisite design that has gone practically unchanged for decades (you can’t improve perfection). Maybe if the 7700 was a 7.2V iron instead of 2.4V an LED would make more sense, but for good reason, it’s not. Besides, that big, ugly 10mm ultra-bright LED is obtrusive and would get in my way when soldering in tight spaces (isn’t that why we use cordless irons in the 1st place?). If I were to modify a newer model 7700 iron at all, it would be to retrofit it with the old screw style E10 light bulb instead of the bayonet type. I can get a 2.25V 222 penlight bulb almost anywhere, but not so easily done with the newer bulbs.
Still, kudos to Iso-Tip, for not caving in to the LED maniacs and leaving that little penlight bulb alone (for the most part, that is).
I watched the video and it is something I may consider doing. I think the charging light is a necessity whether is located on the base or on the iron.
A question I have is , where are the circuit diagrams?
I added the charging light pretty much as he did on my 1976 vintage 7700. I used a standard diode. Another thing I did was convert it from fast charge to slow charge with a resistor in series after the diode. The third thing was to convert it to NiMH. Slow charge greatly improved the NiCad battery life. The NiMH is going on three years with no degradation in service and I can leave it out of the socket for weeks and still have a full charge.