I've never heard of that before. Is this another "Big Brother" thing???
Mike

It's the duty cycle to prevent it from overheating and burning out.

Oh, yes, Big Brother has to protect us from being hurt by any tool, even if it ruins the way the tool should work, and makes it unusable!
I bought an air operated cut-off tool, hand held, with the skinny little disc on the end of the tool. It was useless-i couldn't get the tool into position to cut anything with it. Snip-snip! Works now, and the plastic shield is long gone. Plastic eye shields worn on the head work well to prevent injuries! Same thing with a hand-held grinder that takes the body shop discs. I tried to use it, but couldn't get the tool down flat enough to be able to grind flat with it! Snip-snip! Works now!

canguy is probably right, it's to keep it from burning up but it also rendered it just about useless. I was wondering if there is a way you can by-pass it?

canguy is right and you are WRONG. The reason why you are unhappy with this gun is because you are asking it to do work it was never intended to perform.

Weller soldering guns are excellent tools for joining light guage wiring down to about 16 guage. What you need is a regular soldering IRON, not a gun. Soldering irons put out heat non-stop.

Trying to defeat the duty-cycle of this product is like replacing the 15 amp fuse in your main panel with a 30 amp one. The duty-cycle feature is there to protect the tool from failure and to protect the person using it from having it literally burn up in their hands.

Thanks for all of the replies. I understand completely that the duty cycle is a safety feature and that replacing fuses with higher amperage is dangerous. I would think that this solder gun could go for longer than one minute before it would burn up. I didn't plan on holding the trigger on indefinately. The way it is now, you can only solder one wire every five minutes. Weller does make a continuous heat solder gun but unfortunately I purchased the wrong one.

Then, you already have a safe solution to this problem, don't you? Just go and buy the right tool for the job. That's what Pro's do.

If you do a lot of soldering work, solder iron is the way to go. I have Weller and one even nicer one. They are heat up really fast. You can change tips for different temperature and tip size.