Thank you guys for the information. I'll do my best to take care of it. Thankfully, nothing is shorted and the arc tube is not contacting the IR coating.

Almost had an EOL occur with one of my cheapo HID headlights in The Genesis yesterday. My right headlight kept failing to strike an arc.
Bright flashes from the ignitor, but no light. Later on I tried again, yielding the same result at first, but the second try was successful,
although it gave off a very bright/ flickering purple flash at first... then began flickering madly during warm up time. The lamp flickered
and randomly became a bit too bright... but then it calmed down as time went on, and hasn't had an issue ever since. Not sure what that was about.
This event occurred last night, but I was unable to post about it since I was busy with work. Even though this happened yesterday, and even though
this wasn't an official EOL, I'll count it. Same goes for you guys... if your lamp *almost* went EOL, it counts here... talk about it.

@Ash
Yea the only thing I use the old iron for is large (larger than 14AWG) wires, never for anything small and sensitive.

I should really test out my old iron to see how isolated the tip really is, this is scaring me! And I work on a concrete basement floor (usually with no shoes, though I know that isn't good) so I am probably fairly solidly grounded from an electrocution perspective, which is obviously not super great.

@RRK
The iron layer dissolves in the solder? Isn't that not supposed to happen, like the point of plating it in the first place? Or is some dissolution necessary for wetting?

So temperature control is the main thing here, that is good. Mine has an adjustable temperature readout controller thingy in the handle, not sure how accurate it is but it definitely does adjust the temperature to some satisfactory degree.

Let's agree to disagree about solder I guess, you do what works for you, I do what works for me. Not sure how to phrase this nicely, and I don't feel like whipping out ChatGPT to do it for me so I really hope you don't take this the wrong way: What solder I choose to use really doesn't affect you in the slightest, so I don't know why you care so much. Not worth continuing this conversation. No hard feelings.
 

Part numbers will be hard for buyers to find

"Lamp light 40W CCT 4000K G13 1.5 inch high frequency instant start compatible 50Hz 60Hz rapid start compatible save 80% electricity home office garage factory shop" is probably good enough

Iron layer should be of a certain thickness because it still somewhat dissolves in the solder and also oxidizes in the air. And it wears by contact with objects soldered. As soon you have a hole in iron cladding, soldering tip is quickly dead just in a few working hours.

The reason of having a soldering station is to have tip temperature tightly regulated with high spare power available, which is a requirement for any serious soldering job. Well, some modern irons have a controller in the handle, so can be considered soldering stations in one piece.

You may say whatever you want about 'personal choice' but the truth is 37/63 lead solder is just technically better and that's why it is still exempted for special equipment like military, aviation or telecom.

Reasons:

Lead solder is eutectic. Most of lead free solders are not. Eutectic solder melts or freezes at one single temperature, non-eutectic over a range, being a mix of multiple liquid and solid phases. That gives it some unsightly smoked appearance, and sometimes compromise mechanical strength.

Lead solder wets copper significantly better than lead-free one.

Lead-free solder is significantly more prone to crack at thermal cycling

Lead free solder is prone to grow tin whiskers. Lead solder does not have this problem at all. This is very significant.

Good quality lead-free solder, close to eutectic, requires an addition of a large amount of silver (circa 4%) making it *significantly* more expensive!

Still, eutectic lead solder melts at 183C and most of lead-free ones melt at around 220C. This is some 40C higher. Higher stress on the components, faster flux burn-of, faster tip oxidizing.

Isolation transformer will improve your safety, but may by itself still have enough capacitive coupling to have enough leakage current, to damage sensitive components

For example if you touch it to the gate of a MOSFET while its other terminals are connected to more circuitry that you touch (completing it to ground) etc

So keep it for LEDs and resistors, but don't do modern electronics with it

On the subject of ungrounded irons, i have a more recent story (~10 years ago)

I had a friend here - old guy, their family were friends with my parents, and somehow me and him figured that we can have some fun at the garage. (had - because he had poor health and passed away since)

He was not an electronics guy by any means, but had general handyman hobby (welding grinding), and besides, he liked to buy all sorts of dodgy stuff from Ebay and Aliexpress for gags and entertainment, so i came for the gags and entertainment part

One of the things he got fascinated with was LED lights and gadgets of all kinds. Being from Aliexpress they would blow up all the time

Then we would break out the soldering iron (also from Aliexpress) to hack it to work again (smash the LED that died and solder blob over it, replace capacitor with one out of another blown gadget, etc) and see if it lasts for a while more or smoke comes out again

When holding the board with LEDs (taken out of whatever light or gadget) and touching the iron to them, LEDs would light up - Quite brightly, and quite long stretches of LEDs in series - showing that the voltage is high (typically 1/2 the line voltage, so in our case about 115AC to ground)

The current was small, probably on the order of 0.1mA, which you normally can't feel. However, it clearly can break down to full short to live anytime without any advance warning

So i did just sit in lotus position in a plastic chair and use the iron anyway...

I bought this spectrometer from Aliexpress.
However it have problems as you can see from the attachment, where it can't capture the correct spectra of lightsource like my Osram HCI-TS 70W/830.
Also: I don't know how to import spectra to my computer with it.
Why this is happening?

@RRK
Really? I would assume that the thin plating of a tip wouldn't make the thermal conductivity that much worse but I guess not.

Why is a whole soldering station necessary? I never really got that, and I feel like the induction function will only get in my way when I am trying to solder a bunch of stuff. How long do those take to warm back up?

As to lead vs lead-free I do appreciate your advice. I know that the lead won't evaporate, but handling lead very often when alternatives are available just makes me feel a little weird if ya know what I mean, even if realistically it isn't ever a problem. I don't really care that if you wash your hands you are supposedly okay, I just don't feel like taking that risk if it is unnecessary. I learned soldering with lead-free, never knew any different, maybe it works worse than leaded but I haven't had any problems since I got the hang of it. A completely individualized decision, everybody has their preferred methods. Maybe in 10 years I will try leaded and then regret that I haven't listened to you, who knows.

@Ash
Oof, that is scary. My new iron is grounded, but my old one isn't. Maybe not such a great thing... Might break out my isolation transformer next time I have to use it lol 

I'm very neat, in my room you can't see any of my collection since its all in storage, the only place where I actually store things out is in my little crafting space but my parents don't really care about it. Since I like a clean room, I store a Metalux wraparound with like a dozen F40s in the cover underneath my bed, and 5 F40 fixtures underneath my couch with one of them holding another dozen F40s. I had to give the case that my F34s came in to a friend since it was too big for my room, but other than that I have been able to find space for everything (though I am starting to run low.) I think my last big fixture for awhile if I can get it would be some sort of 4x2 troffer!

Dont disturb it to prevent bending the wires forward and back by moving of the arctube, and to prevent the arctube from coming out of the disk on the other side (that holds the pip of the tube)

Use it in a position in which it does not touch the inside wall of the outer envelope, so i won't make contact with the ITO coating

Otherwise i dont think there will be a difference in how it works

In short, maybe install it somewhere to work like in your garden, and get a 2nd one for handling and testing