teenage engineering × HAKKO

Announced October 14, 2014, at teenage engineering's studio in Stockholm, the SO-1 began as a complaint. The service bench where returned OP-1s were opened and repaired had run HAKKO FX-951 stations for three years, and Jesper Kouthoofd wrote to Osaka asking to buy the control board, the coil and the handpiece without the case. HAKKO replied that it did not sell its stations in pieces, but would build one properly if Stockholm drew the box. Two engineers arrived that spring with a suitcase of T12 cartridges.

The case is a single block of bead-blasted aluminium, cut by the supplier that mills the OP-1 chassis and hollowed from below for the board and transformer. It is heavy enough that the iron comes out of the coil one-handed without the station sliding. Every pocket on top holds one thing: the screen, the encoder, the coil, the brass wool and four spare tips, each tip hole marked with a small engraved drawing of its own shape instead of a part number. HAKKO's only condition was colour. The grip, the encoder cap and the wool liner stayed royal blue and canary yellow, so a technician could find all three without looking.

The 0.96-inch OLED shows temperature in teenage engineering's own numerals. While the iron sleeps in its coil, the screen draws a solder fillet slowly forming around a through-hole lead; when the tip reaches set temperature, the fillet completes and the screen goes still. Pressing the encoder swaps between two presets. The first is 340°C, the temperature the Stockholm bench used for re-seating OP-1 encoders. The second is 183°C and cannot be changed, which teenage engineering described as a reminder.

The music technology press called it the first soldering station anyone had wanted to leave out on a desk. Hackaday pointed out that the same heater, board and handpiece came in an FX-951 for about $230. Both were right. The first batch of 500 sold through the web shop in nine days, mostly to people who already owned an FX-951.