I'm a cheap bastard. I'm also a tool junkie.
To balance the two out regarding my soldering rig, I went to ePay to start. I picked up a Hakko station for $40 that had no wands. I figured I'd just be patient and find them later. Of course I discovered that handpieces are harder to find than base stations, but I just kept digging and found a place that sells cheap import ones. They were billed to be temperature controlled, but once I got into them (after finding they didn't work with my station) I discovered that they were definitely NOT temperature-controlled as there weren't even temperature sensors or wires for them. Just yer basic cheap wattage-rated stuff. Cheap Chinese crap.
Not to be deterred, I went back to ePay and found genuine Hakko replacement heating elements for a pretty good deal, and once they arrived I was very surprised and pleased to find that they assembled into the import handpieces perfectly. Turns out the cheap imports I bought are dimensionally exact clones of the Hakko stuff. Whew!
I immediately plugged everything in and fired it up. I cannot tell you how extremely comfortable it is to use good quality soldering/desoldering equipment. It's just amazing how well it functions. My first experiment was to desolder a 40-pin chip. Once I hit all the pads, it just fell out! The quality of my soldering instantly doubled at least. At the time I didn't do that much soldering, but since then I've got into learning microcontrollers and getting into electronics, so what was going to originally be an occasionally-used tool turns out to be used all the time these days. Even if I didn't use it that much, it was worth the expense to have the good stuff even for occasional use.
The total cost for the stuff I bought ended up around (US)$175, but that is a screaming deal for the rig I ended up with. It's a pain in the ass to chase the parts and put it together, but that was worth it too - at least this time.
The only potential downside is it isn't very portable, so if that's a concern then you should look at different types than I got, but be sure to get the good stuff whatever you get. For me the portability isn't a big deal as I much prefer to work at the bench anyway. For "in-the-game" work I have a standard soldering iron with a long cord that works fine for soldering wires to tabs & such.
So IMPORTANT NOTE: When you buy cheap import stuff, it may not be at all what it claims to be, so verify the facts first. I got my cheap handpieces from
http://store.sra-solder.com/index.php. It looks like good stuff, and I'm sure some of it is OK, but check things out first before spending your money. I'm still happy I got the handpieces from them as they were still very inexpensive and comfortable in the hand, but it cost me $50 more than it could have if the stuff was what it was supposed to be.
Here's a pic of my rig:
