SDG #283 A USB-C JBC C245 Soldering Iron

The L245 is a bare bones USB-C powered handpiece with a genuinely interesting selling point: it accepts JBC C245 cartridges rather than locking you into a proprietary or clone-only tip range. At roughly £43 delivered, the CNC machined aluminium body, anodised finish and soft grip section feel far better than the price suggests, and the tip to grip distance is close enough to a real JBC handle that the ergonomics translate directly.

The firmware is where things get mixed. There are no instructions, so the menu structure has to be reverse engineered, but it hides some unusually capable features for this class of tool, including four temperature presets, adjustable step size, sleep and shutdown timers, a requested PD voltage setting, and per-tip calibration slots with a multi-point curve rather than a single offset. Out of the box the tip ran around 15 to 25 degrees C low across the range, and correcting that meant repeatedly bouncing between the calibration menu and the main screen. A display offset bug also clips pixels when the screen is flipped.

The real limitation is electrical. A genuine JBC C245 cartridge measures about 2.8 ohms against roughly 7 ohms for the supplied Chinese cartridge, so at 20 V from a PD supply the inrush current trips the iron’s protection and it resets. Dropping to 12 V allows genuine cartridges to run, but heat-up is sluggish and thermal recovery in the coin test sags well below setpoint at around 50 W. There is no constant power mode to cap current at the rated 65 W, so buyers wanting full performance would need to feed DC through a modified USB-C cable. Good value and excellent tip flexibility, with a firmware ceiling on performance.