Mico soldering irons

[gim4611]

I presume there are few old blokes here (I use that term accurately as there were no virtually women in the soldering game years ago)... So does anyone remember the Mico "Pencil Line Miniature Soldering Iron"? They came in different colours; 3V was red, 6V was black; I can't remember what colour 12V was.

 

[shrtrnd]

Nope, are you saying you have some of these, and they're antiques?
Also, my 92 year-old mother would correct you on women soldering years ago.
Her mother worked at Willow Run outside Detroit during WWII, and all they had were women solderers for the bombers they built.
An interesting side-note, to me anyway, was they also had women paint phosphorus on the gauge needles so flyers could see their dials at night. Being women, and wanting them done prettily, they put the tiny brushes in their mouths to make sure the brush point-end was perfectly pointed when they painted-on the dial tick-marks. They all died from throat cancer in the after-years.

 

[gim4611]

I only have one, 6V. I would like to get a 3V one so I could run it off my Scope transformer. I don't know when they first came out, but they were around in the '60s and '70s.

I stand corrected on the women soldering.

Wikipedia has a page on the "Radium girls".

 

[ivak245]

I reckon I still have one of these, it was gold coloured, and I had it set up to use while working on cars with a cigarette lighter plug. I remember making a stand for it which had a microswitch and a resistor so when it was put down on the stand, it would only get around 6 volts through the resistor. I forget why I came up with this, but I had it set up like that for around 30 years!

 

[gim4611]

Hi, Thanks for your post, so now we have three colours and voltages. If one Googles "Mico soldering iron" one gets nothing; they are virtually unknown now. Good idea of yours to have the half-cutout, so it wasn't hot, but not cold either. I wonder if there were anymore voltages; probably not. I would love to get a 3V (red) one.