How We Built a 100-Watt Soldering Iron During Supply Chain Hell

Last year, we released our first-ever electronic tool, the FixHub Portable Soldering Iron, and we’ve been honored to see that the tech community has shared our excitement about it. 

If you’ll forgive a little bragging: Wired called it “incredibly well designed” and said it “goes a long way toward making soldering more approachable for newcomers.” PCMag called it “incredibly comfortable” for hours of soldering. Hackaday gave it the proper iFixit teardown treatment and called the iron and hub “some of the most easily disassembled devices I’ve ever come across.” We sold out of the first run in preorder, and then again every time we did another run, and we’ve only recently been able to keep it consistently in stock.  

We’ve told a bit of the story of making it: an introduction to why we made it, how we engineered the tips, and how and when the iron outputs 100W. 

But we didn’t make it alone. And in this article, we want to tell the bigger story behind it and behind our collaboration with Intercreate, the product development firm we tapped to help us figure out the challenges of making a high-powered USB-C device.

Solder is the Glue of the Modern World

In iFixit’s repair efforts over the last 20 years, we’ve fought two opposing battles: 

One, we want the people who make electronics to stop soldering everything. An annoying number of gadgets put a little gob of solder between you and changing out your battery. Batteries, of course, are consumables. Eventually you’ll need to change them out. Compared to connectors, solder makes repair more time-consuming, error-prone, and intimidating.  

But wait, intimidating? Why is soldering intimidating? And therein lies our second battle: we want everyone to learn how to solder. It’s really not that hard. It’s basically like using a hot glue gun. It’s an essential repair skill, and until you learn it, your capacity to fix the stuff around you will be limited. Every day, we teach hundreds of people how to solder via our repair guides and videos. Want to replace a battery in the iPod Touch or change an iPhone 12 speaker? We’ve got you, step by step.

As we’ve taught soldering, though, we’ve been frustrated by the tools available. A lot of irons are clunky and awkward to hold. They take a long time to heat up to get ready to work and cool down to be safe to handle. Long power cords make them hard to move around.

That’s the origin of FixHub. A while back, I was wiring up the stereo in my car and ran into a common soldering problem: I had to drag out an extension cord and balance a soldering station on my lap, sitting in the passenger seat. And I thought, there’s got to be a better way.

So our product design team accepted that challenge. What is the better way?

What’s Wrong with Most Soldering Irons? 

Battery Powered Is Better

Sure, sometimes you want to solder sitting at a dedicated workbench, but likely as not, especially if you’re soldering for repair, you’re going to want to solder where your thing has broken: In your truck. On a boat. On the Comic Con convention floor, when the lights on your Iron Man Arc Reactor stop glowing blue. 

Plus, being tethered to the wall can be annoying at best, even dangerous when you’re attaching a tripwire to a 400-degree soldering iron. We’re often teaching soldering at repair cafes, where we might want five or six irons running at once, and the spiderweb of extension cords makes a lot of people nervous. So we knew we wanted something battery-powered.

Hold It Like a Pencil

What else? When you ask someone who’s never soldered before to pick up a soldering iron, they very well might reach for the hot part. There are way too many stock photos of serious-looking people focusing hard on a motherboard, holding the hot soldering iron barrel like a pencil.

But once we stopped laughing at these photos, they became a design challenge for us. It’s not crazy to want to hold a soldering iron close to the tip. People hold pencils that way because it gives us better fine motor control. A common tripod pencil grip lets us use our dexterous index finger to control the movement and our thumb to stabilize. What if we made a soldering iron that people would pick up naturally? What if we designed the grip to allow people to hold it like a pencil? How close could we get the grip to the hot tip of the barrel?

We wanted a soldering iron that would, in the design of its grip, show people how to use it: a space clearly designed for a natural hold, a groove ring to warn you when you’re getting close to the edge of the safe zone, and a shape that gives you confidence the iron won’t roll away and melt something you don’t want melted. 

Heats Up and Tears Down Quick

Better yet, getting the heater close to the tip made the iron more efficient. It could heat up and cool down faster, because there was less mass of metal to heat and cool.

As we talked about it, our wishlist grew. Since we’re iFixit, we knew it had to be repairable, of course, which means people should be able to take it apart down to its bones and replace any parts they need. It should heat up fast, because it’s annoying to wait for an iron to get hot again between solder joints. It should have interchangeable tips. It should have a simple user interface, including an indicator light that makes you confident about whether or not it’s hot.

And over time, we became increasingly convinced that it should be USB-powered.

Why USB-C? 

Because it’s ubiquitous, convenient, and can pass both power and data over one cable. We wanted to be able to have a standalone iron that would work with a wide range of cables, a wide range of power sources, but would also communicate with our own power station. We discovered that by using USB-C Alt Mode, the iron could send data packets back and forth to the station over serial but also remember its settings on the iron.

The hub itself we imagined would be a powerful battery for anything you own already, from your phone to your laptop to (with a USB-C-to-barrel adapter like our VoltClip) pretty much anything. Drum machines, guitar pedals, transistor radios, and so on. 

It also allows you to plug the soldering iron into a USB Power Delivery charger, like the one that you use to charge your laptop. It means that when you throw the FixHub Portable Soldering Station into your backpack, you don’t need to bring a separate battery bank to charge your other electronics.

But as excited as we were about the possibilities of USB-C, we weren’t actually sure how to make it happen.

Intercreate to the Rescue

Ironically for a team that has made our name critiquing the world’s consumer electronics products, we didn’t have experience designing circuits ourselves. And this wasn’t a beginner project: we wanted to push the USB standard to the absolute limit with a full hundred watts of power and a beefy battery pack that could handle dramatic power surges and heat cycling.

We couldn’t use anything off the shelf for a couple reasons: an iron like this hadn’t been made before (the open source IronOS project started later), and we wanted a repairable design all the way through.

So who do you go to when you want to design a super safe battery pack that’s rugged enough to live in your toolbox? The military has notoriously high standards for battery safety and durability, and Dave Desrochers’ team at Intercreate had just finished designing a USB-C battery pack for an application that I’m not allowed to tell you about. He started the design firm after watching electronics design projects fail during manufacturing in a bewildering variety of subtle ways. 

100 Watts at Your Fingertips

Electrical engineers use soldering irons every day, and Intercreate immediately jumped at the chance to improve the design of their favorite tool. The first challenge we gave them: how can we pack 100 watts of power safely into a small, ergonomic pencil? 

“From the hardware perspective, a hundred watts is a lot of power. You don’t see that in a lot of consumer electronics,” says Rob Helvestine, who’s an avid cyclist, a father of two, and also the Partner and Principal Engineer at Intercreate who designed our electronics. 

To put this in perspective, we’re pushing five amps of current through a USB-C connection. That’s enough electricity to power a small household appliance, crammed into a 24-gauge wire not much thicker than a strand of hair. Most consumer electronics sip power like a hummingbird at a feeder. FixHub was designed to gulp it like a fire hose.

A smartphone charger draws 20 watts on a hungry day. Most laptops might draw 65 watts if they’re feeling ambitious. We were building something that demanded 100 watts of sustained power delivery, putting us in the same league as high-end gaming laptops.

We needed that much power to enable the soldering experience we were imagining. Fast heating allows the iron to power down after every connection and then come back up to full power in the time it takes you to pick it up to solder. That makes it safer and easier for people new to soldering to work with, because it’s only hot when it absolutely needs to be. 

A Battery Pack with Potential

We also wanted to make the battery pack dual-purpose. Batteries are expensive, and it’s a lot easier to justify spending the money on a pack for your soldering iron if it can also power your laptop or phone.

“You want to make the design as generic as possible, independent of the end application,” explains Dave.

After a lot of tinkering and iteration, the design that we settled on with Intercreate was to make the control circuitry intrinsic to the tool, not the power station. The power station acts as the control board and screen, but the actual control processing is done on the tool itself. That allowed us to make the iron function with any power source, and as long as it can deliver 100 watts, it will function about as well as the dedicated FixHub Power Station.

The decentralized design extends all the way through the interface: the icon that it displays on its screen to show you which tool is connected is stored on the tool itself, not in the hub. 

Another challenge was the battery design itself. For such high power, you need to “find the right supporting components to support the maximum current output and power, [and] still allow it to be rechargeable,” says Rob. In the end, the unit is made up of fairly commoditized cells, but in a custom configuration and with the supporting components and software to make everything safe as well as powerful. 

Once we had settled on a design, it was time to adventure out into the world to source parts and create the bill of materials.

Electronics Design in a Chip Shortage

Except, we timed it horrifically wrong. Just as we finalized the FixHub design, the world imploded. COVID-19 shut down factories and shattered the intricate global supply chain that modern electronics depend on. Suddenly, the microcontrollers and specialized components that formed the beating heart of our soldering iron were all but impossible to find. In the depths of the pandemic, a simple chip that cost fifty cents in 2019 now commanded fifty dollars, if you could find it at all.

Picture this nightmarish feedback loop: Rob and Dave at Intercreate would spend days perfecting a circuit board design, sourcing every component with surgical precision, only to discover that a key part was impossible to purchase. It was like trying to build a puzzle while someone kept stealing the pieces. 

“We’d finish the design of the entire board,” Rob recalls wearily, “and when we went to get it fabricated, two of the parts would be impossible to find.” Each missing component meant redesigning entire sub-circuits and rebalancing power delivery systems.

We’d finish the design of the entire board, and when we went to get it fabricated, two of the parts would be impossible to find.

— Rob Helvestine, Partner and Principal Engineer at Intercreate

The semiconductor shortage forced us into technological gambling: do we buy 10,000 units of a critical component right now, betting the farm on a design that might need to change tomorrow, or risk having no components at all in six months? Imagine trying to stock a restaurant when you don’t know if you’ll be able to buy eggs next week. Do you buy twice as many now, just in case?

Intercreate: The Heroes of Hardware Hell

Intercreate became supply chain sorcerers. Dave and his team used their deep industry connections to find alternative components that could handle our demanding design. They reimagined entire approaches to power delivery, sometimes discovering better solutions through necessity than we might have found through comfort. 

Intercreate’s creativity made sure that our USB-C soldering iron survived its trial by COVID supply chain disruption to reach your toolbox.

The Tools That Make the Tools: Manufacturing’s Hidden Complexity

Making a product requires building a system to build the machine. We were designing the machines that would test the machines. Welcome to the recursive nightmare of modern manufacturing, where every product needs its own elaborate testing infrastructure before a single unit can ship. 

Imagine if before you could bake a cake, you needed to build the oven, calibrate the thermometer, and write the recipe. In our case, the “oven” was a $100,000 test fixture with its own schematics, software, and documentation requirements that rivaled the complexity of the FixHub itself. 

These fixtures aren’t just fancy jigs; they’re sophisticated pieces of engineering that need to simulate real-world conditions, measure precise electrical characteristics, and catch defects that human eyes and hands simply cannot detect.

When Engineering Meets Ancient Wisdom: The Kuai Kuai Moment

On one trip to Taiwan, we were in crunch mode. Nothing was working. By day four in that Taiwanese factory, Rob Helvestine looked like a man who’d been wrestling with electronic demons—and losing. He’d spent the previous night hunched over his laptop in a sterile hotel room, refining test parameters and debugging firmware until his eyes burned. Was it the firmware? The test fixture? The hardware itself? Each failed board felt like a personal affront to his design.

After each iteration of development, Rob would go back to the production line and try again. At this point in engineering, there’s not much you can do but start up the machines and cross your fingers.

But in Taiwan, you do more than cross your fingers when you’re trying to get stubborn equipment to work. You break out the snacks. 

Kuai Kuai is a puffed corn snack, popular in Taiwan both as a snack food and as a way of handling temperamental machinery. “Kuai kuai” means “well-behaved,” and engineers across the country adorn their machines with bags of the coconut butter-flavored snacks (which come in a green bag, the same color as the light that indicates a machine is functioning correctly). Got a problem machine? Tape a bag of Kuai Kuai to it.

By the end of the FixHub development, none of us doubted that it worked.

When Success Becomes Its Own Challenge

We finally launched FixHub in September 2024. That launch arrived with what every product developer dreams of and simultaneously fears: overwhelming demand. When we opened for preorders, we expected slow but serious interest from repair enthusiasts and electronics professionals. Instead, we got hit by a tsunami of orders that made our conservative projections look laughably naive. It’s the kind of problem you want to have, until you actually have it.

Here’s the beautiful irony of hardware manufacturing. Just when you think you’ve conquered the technical dragons, the market dragons show up with an entirely different set of teeth. Our test fixtures were humming along beautifully. But success in manufacturing is about making products work at scale, consistently, under pressure.

“Almost” Is Surprisingly Expensive

The units rolling off our production line weren’t broken; they were almost perfect. And in manufacturing, “almost” is the most expensive word in the English language. We discovered dozens of minor issues that could lead to field failures down the road. A connector that wasn’t quite seated properly. A calibration that drifted just outside acceptable tolerances. Software timing that worked fine in most conditions but might hiccup under edge cases.

Each of these discoveries meant stopping the line, diagnosing the root cause, implementing fixes, and then going back through our inventory of finished units to apply retroactive repairs. What followed was a masterclass in the brutal mathematics of hardware scaling. Demand was growing faster than our ability to manufacture clean units. Every day we delayed meant more preorders stacking up, more customer emails asking for updates, more pressure on our factory partners who were already working overtime to perfect processes that we hadn’t been prepared to handle at this scale.

Anyone who’s developed an electronic product is probably nodding about now; this is “situation normal” for hardware design. But as first-time electrical tool designers, we learned by jumping in at the deep end. This was a complicated tool for a first-time project, and our enthusiastic global repair community gave us scale problems that we’d only dreamt about.

Through it all, we’ve been grateful to be able to lean on the experience and expertise of Intercreate. They have been our teammates in troubleshooting, our rework rocketeers, and without them, we would’ve been lost many times over.

Finally Caught Up: The Sweet Spot of Supply and Demand

This summer, our production finally caught up with demand: Today, if you order a FixHub Portable Soldering Station, we’ll start packaging it up for you right away.

A year after the launch, we’re able to look back on the early challenges and laugh at the times we cursed the firmware, pinned our hopes on bags of coconut snacks, and burned holes in our workbenches testing iron after iron. 

But thanks in significant part to the brains and engineering brawn of our partners, we’re also able to look back on our initial list of design goals with pride. 

Yes, we’ve succeeded in making a 100-watt portable soldering iron that you can hold like a pencil. And it’s so ergonomically designed that reviewers have actually described hours of soldering as “comfortable.” It heats up so quickly that whenever we demo it, the orange “ready to solder” ring is glowing by the time we’ve finished describing just how fast it gets hot. 

And now that we’ve successfully ramped up manufacturing with the help of the Intercreate team and way too many bags of Kuai Kuai, we have plenty of FixHub toolkits and smart irons in stock. We’re finally ready to teach the world to solder.