SDG #354 Quick 861 Pro High Power Hot Air Station

Quick’s 861 Pro sits at the top of their hot air range, and the headline changes over the 861DX and TR1300A are a bigger brushless blower (70 L/min instead of 55), a fourth preset slot, three stage programmable reflow profiles and offline voice recognition. This review covers all four, plus a full strip down of the chassis.

The build quality argument is easy to make: a mostly metal case at around 4.5 kg, screwed rather than glued feet, bonded earth lugs from the IEC inlet to both inner and outer chassis, and a tidy split between a mains power supply board (triac heater drive, four Jamicon caps on a 350 V rail, inrush limiting and common mode filtering) and a much lighter three phase BLDC driver using small surface mount MOSFETs where the older TR1300A needed heatsinked parts. The front panel runs an STM32 with SRAM and an audio codec feeding a bottom mounted microphone.

Performance-wise the crisp TFT and live graphing screen are genuine usability wins, though the airflow trace shows a clear overshoot before settling, suggesting the loop tuning could be tighter. Removing a chip from a graphics card needed 400 C rather than the initial 350 C, and the power meter peaked briefly near 1,400 W before settling in the low hundreds, which is the key buying insight: the extra wattage mostly buys faster warm-up, not more real world capability.

The voice control is the weak spot. Commands must be spoken verbatim from the manual, several phrasings are awkward translations, and temperature commands repeatedly failed. Nozzle selection is also thin for a flagship. Worth considering for a new purchase; not a compelling upgrade if you already own a Quick station.