Metcal MX-PS5000 repair.

Been very busy, in a commercial sense, building some transmitting equipment ...

... and just as I'm about to solder the last two wires on the front panel of said equipment, the iron goes cold ...

The soldering iron in question is the very, very wonderful Metcal MX-PS5000 system. I used to think Weller made the rolls-royce of soldering irons, but these things are just in a different league!

They heat the element by RF induction heating. 13.560 MHz to be precise. It's got all manner of error detecting, it'll put itself to sleep when not in use, and also has outputs for two irons. It's also expensive.

So I think, it's probably gone to sleep ... nope.
Perhaps the tip has failed? No... (takes two seconds to change too!!)

Damn ... the emergency iron is flagged into service, and the job finished...

A new MX-PS5200 is ordered (at about £500!.. ouch). We simply can't be without it.

But let's see if we can't do anything about the old one...


Firstly, remove the retaining nuts from each of the F-connectors.


















Flip the unit over, and remove the 4 security torx screws, one in each corner.

Right, that's got it out. To remove the board there are several small screws to undo, and remove the screws from the heat sinked (heat sunk?) devices, noting which are insulated from the heatsink, and which are not. The wires connecting the power supply in the back and the main board are quite short.















First thing was to check the presence of the +48V  and  +24V supplies from the switched mode mounted in the rear third of the enclosure.. all present and correct... damn.. out goes any ideas of a blown fuse and a quick-fix! There's no hope of getting a schematic, so it's down to the poke-and-hope method of fault-finding....

Checking a few parts, shows the main output FET to be dead short ... It is (or rather was) an IXFH12N50P, which is no longer available. An IXFH16N50P looks like a good candidate, and is pressed into service.... still not warming the iron... damn. It's gate is driven by a drive amplifier, which is in turn driven by an oscillator formed by a crystal, and a 74HC04 hex inverter... the hex inverter is duff, and is replaced, and so is the supply to the drive amplifier...

It's an LM2576-ADJ (not that you'd know from the photo) .... and replacing that restores the supply to the second stage of the drive amp, but not all of it .... damn.














The final piece of the jigsaw is D12 in the small switched mode buck converter .... it too was dead short ... lord knows what the original is, there's no circuit anywhere on the web, so I selected a 1N5819HW for the job, based on the datasheet for U3. It's physically smaller than the diode it replaced, but it seems to work! I've got a hot iron!













Excellent ! We now have a spare in the workshop.

Not sure I like Metcal's new logo much ...