WESD51 Lockout Pencil Tip

I just received a very nice Weller WESD51 soldering station from work where we had a few that just weren’t frequently used. I was annoyed, however, to find out that the temperature lockout was set – that is, I couldn’t raise the temperature above an arbitrary value set by someone as an upper limit earlier. I was more annoyed to find out that there’s no control on the panel to set this. Instead, there’s some silly magic wand that you’re supposed to hold over a logo on the panel to get the job done. A wand that I didn’t have. So I was looking around online to try to figure out what the thing was, and I noticed it looked like the tip was a little magnet. And so it is – there’s a magnetic reed switch mounted underneath the “ESD Safe” logo on this unit that controls a number of functions. In the end, I am now just keeping one of the many magnetic reaching wand pencils I have laying around next to my station to set the lockout temperature. Hopefully, if you found this via Google, you’re less confused now.

As an aside, a bunch of the other settings of the unit are managed via this reed switch too. I’m including a link to the documentation here, since it was a bit difficult to track down.
Weller WESD51 Soldering Station Documentation