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

Yep. My station today is an old 2nd hand Metcal. It beats the Hakko 951 i had in my previous workplace, which in itself is a very nice iron too

@Multisubject
And that was not my 1st iron. My first was the cheapest 25W iron (of standard 25W size) of the late 90s. Something from China with a black bakelite handle, no ground, no company name, and an anonymous gold QC PASS label

It lasted for a while and its tip didnt erode, but one day while i was soldering it just died with a bang and white flash from the rifle holes around the heating element's external tube

I got a 2nd identical one. It lasted for a while too. One day i came to solder something, put the iron on the component, touched the solder wire to the point, and got slapped with full 230V through the solder wire, hand, body and foot

Then i got the one described above, that had ground and lasted for many years despite the bad tip

Soldering iron tip should combine the best possible thermal transfer with certain resistance to dissolving in molten solder. Industry settled on copper core with thick iron coating as a compromise. Many years ago I used soldering tips with bare copper, I can say they had slightly better heat transfer than modern 2-layer ones, BUT lasted only a few hours before re-grinding was required even with low working temperatures used in the past.

Human life time is limited, so there are definitely better things to do instead of DIY-ing something as mundane as soldering tips Hunt down a good soldering station. JBC clones seems to be in vogue today) personally I am a bit conservative and prefer induction soldering stations. Metcal even modern Chinese built is very good, also induction cartridges with thermal feedback via thermocouple like Chinese brand Quick 202/303 are very nice too.

There is no reason to use lead free solder for personal work, as you are not bound by ecological regulations. Standard 63Sn 37Pb alloy works just better, and lead toxicity is non-issue, as it does not evaporate significantly at soldering temperatures (and even somewhat higher).
 
 

I doubt there is anything you can do to fix this, but as long as things aren't shorted out inside it should still work fine. Maybe slightly reduced performance from reduced heat reflection but nothing major I would assume.