For anyone reading, the key is to invest in a proper stereo microscope and a decent fume extractor.
I recommend this one: https://www.strangeparts.com/a-boy-and-his-microscope-a-love...
If you're up for a bit of a bonus round, I absolutely love my Pixel Pump. https://shop.robins-tools.com/products/pixel-pump
I picked up a used Ninja toaster oven and hacked a https://reflowmasterpro.com/ to it. I also modified the plans for Stencil Fix to make it substantially bigger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am3ztQIkss0
So, I do a fair bit of both reflow and hand SMD soldering at this point, depending on what the situation calls for. It's great fun.
# Soldering iron
I'd recommend the Pinecil V2 with IronOS. https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS
# Solder fume extraction
I've built a simple fume extraction with an old plastic case, a 120mm fan and a sheet of carbon filter attached to a 120mm dryer / air conditioning hose. Around 15$ and good enough for soldering from time to time.
# "Microscope"
I simply use a strong (10x) magnifier glass with a LED ring (around 15$ on Amazon). I can't tell you how often I also used this thing for other purposes.
# Desoldering Pump
Because I needed it (beginners won't) I bought a ZD-8965 for 100 bucks and I'm very happy with this thing.
I have whole list of cheap beginner to intermediate equipment, that'll do until you solder (semi) professionally.
If you need a reflow oven, that's a different thing altogether, and you should probably repurpose an old toaster oven.
I delivered production boards (small run) that looked and worked great using a non-adjustable $10 30w iron (interchangeble tips, though) and a desklamp with the builtin magnifying glass.
You can't really tell the difference between a cheap setup and the expensive solder station I used in a previous employment.
They also contain a 120mm fans, a carbon filter and NO way to lead the fumes out oft the window.
However, you may be right that professional tools are the better choice in this case
I rarely desolder, but I can easily justify a hundred bucks if I can avoid all that hours of work, where I'm also risking damaging an IC, lifting a pad, or something else...
They even come with these compatibility wikis of what PSU or bank to buy.
Higher magnification variants (8x etc) are not nearly as comfy. They get quite long, heavy and expensive. I tried them and did not like them nearly as much. Also beware of short viewing distance, ultra-cheap products that are just a single lens element per eye.
Dios mio, what an absolute pain soldering is without something holding everything in place. It's literally a night and day purchase.
And thank you! I've been looking for a recommendation of a stereo microscope for a long time!
There is a similar vibe with TIG welding as well.
Edit: For a specific recommendation, look for the Geeboon TC22 on AliExpress or Amazon. Don’t forget the tips, you may need to get them separately.
Im a rank amateur so take what I said with a grain of salt. With that said, I have made several cool things in my life that many people've said I could charge money for. I guess you can't really see the mess I made when you can't look inside the housing :)
I've purchased it from the GEEBOON Store on Aliexpress (no affiliate or anything just looked up my order history):
https://geeboontools.aliexpress.com/store/1103439446
All being said you might not be comfortable with supporting the Chinese clone industry, and I can understand that.
(My bullshit detector is making some rather profound gurgling sounds.)
edit: Seriously, my dudes. Links, or it never happened. Anecdotes are just anecdotes. Anecdotally, my soldering iron heats up very quickly as well and I'm very pleased with this, but I'm not making a claim that it heats to an exact, unspecified user-selected temperature in 3 seconds. If you want to present a benchmark, then please present the bench -- with the mark.
Though from looking at some of the chatter about it online, this is only one specific tip they make under ideal conditions, and it seems like often they overshoot the temperature by more than a little on warmup (though this will be the slowest to recover with the tip just held in air as opposed to when actually soldering). Either way, I've used similar products and this kind of speed isn't a crazy suggestion to me.
My TS101 heats up in like 3-4 seconds (330c) on a 100W laptop PD USB C. It doesn't have a lot of mass but it's perfect for microcontroller related stuff. Just not power electronics.
It has a 240W power supply, so it's not just marketing.
I have a Hakko FX-888D. It's pretty good, although I wish there was some way to switch tips that didn't involve letting it cool down to a safe handling temperature.
I am curious what you mean by rework tweezers. Link please!
Another link for folks: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B077BQWMTY
I go through these for solder flux removal like crazy, in combination with an aerosol can of MG Chemicals 4140-400G. Sadly, I think that stuff is unobtainium now.
Hakko FM2023-05 Mini Hot Tweezers Kit or Hakko FX8804-02 Hot Tweezer for Hakko FX-888 for example.
>> I wish there was some way to switch tips that didn't involve letting it cool down
I replace tips while hot: the sleeve is not hot.
I don't know. I've got my station, not a bad one: bought it with the help of a buddy who's very good at soldering. He tried to show me. I've got no choice: I own an old vintage arcade cab from the mid 80s and it's located in the middle of nowhere, in a rural area. So I have to fix it myself.
And oh boy do I suck at it. I watched vids, countless Youtube vids. It's been 10 years and everytime I need to solder something, I still suck at it.
I've come to terms with the fact that there are some things I'm good at and that soldering is never ever going to be one of these. And it's okay.
And I'm amazed by people who can solder properly.
I have never used sandpaper on electronics, but I perhaps similarly use a fiberglass pen. Total game changer for getting old cartridge pins to read again for SNES and GBA games and such. Highly recommend picking one up.
I used to watch people with fancy-looking soldering irons working quickly on stuff in repair shops. Some of that was technique ("it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools"), but some of it was definitely the irons they were using.
And yet: My first soldering experiences were not very good.
The first soldering irons I had, starting 30 years ago or so, were resolutely terrible. I eventually gained a whole assortment of them -- big, medium, small, and ginormous. They were all awful in their own unique ways, and they all lacked a thermostatic temperature control.
I got better solder (I've become a big fan of Kester 44 in a eutectic 63/37 mix) fairly early on, which helped a ton.
Later, I got better soldering irons.
A dozen years ago I bought a Hakko clone temperature-controlled soldering station from an American distributor. It took genuine Hakko tips just fine, and it was better.
5 or 6 years ago, I got a Pinecil v1. I now own two of them: I bought one as a spare in case one broke somehow (it's hard to fix a soldering iron without a soldering iron), but they've both been reliable. It's miles ahead of what I've used before. The v2 should be a bit better yet, but I do not own one of those. They're rather inexpensive.
These Pinecil irons weren't available a decade ago. I wish they had been.
---
Anyway: With the tools decently in-check, my technique got a lot better in a big hurry. I thought I'd learned to be pretty OK at soldering before with my lackluster tools, but the Pinecil iron (and its consistent temperature, sleep modes, and very quick heat-up) helps me get much better results -- faster.
And it's hackable, which (to me) scores some geek points.
---
I've come to think that anybody can learn to solder electronics with reasonable proficiency. I've taught people to solder who were sure they couldn't do it, including people who started off by being surprised by how hot the hot-bits are and walking them back from the ledge.
As with many other skills, it mostly just takes practice. But that practice should be inconsequential -- it's a lot easier to learn when the result is completely unimportant and inconsequential than on a dear 40-year-old arcade board.
To that end: There's ridiculously-inexpensive kits these days that primarily exist just to teach soldering. I learned through-hole the old-fashioned way (by failing), but back then cheap kits didn't exist at the level they do today. :)
If you can tell me more about the specific problems you're having with soldering, I can provide links to specific, specific soldering kits that may help.
(I can provide hands-on help, too, if you're not too far away. No big deal.)
Level 1 is just being able to take two wires and connect them, reliably and cleanly. That's already immensely useful and requires very little skill and equipment. $50 gets you a nice soldering pen, another $50 gets you some tweezers, some flux and a roll of solder and you're set. Work near an open window and have a desk fan blow the fumes away from you, and you're already being more responsible than most people.
Level 2 is something like through-hole soldering, soldering wires to pads, the kind of stuff you'd do working with ESP32, building RC cars, FPV drones or custom IoT devices. Still easy to learn, just a few simple rules. Work quickly, know when to give up and let things cool down. Avoid touching the expensive e-ink display with your soldering iron. Get something better for fume extraction, spend 10 hours soldering and bam, you're better at soldering than literally 99% people out there, you can build and repair all kinds of stuff. This is where most of the cool YouTube stuff happens, your rctestflight and Tom Stanton and Stuff Made Here and Styropyro. You can do most of that with $300-$800 worth of gear, depending on how brave you are.
And then you can worry about SMDs and reflowing and other arcane stuff, or decide that you probably won't need it.
Beyond the soldering iron, my recommendations that are not too obvious at first sight:
* solder paste (verrrry useful, just get it, and use it)
* something to purify air that _pulls_ it (a reverse fan) with a carbon filter (~30 USD)
* magnifying glass, hopefully attached to a ring of LEDs + a stand so you can see what you are doing (30-60 USD)
* solder sucker, hopefully automated (5 USD non-automated, 80 USD+ automated)
Everything is lead-free surface mount now. Solder paste, stencils, reflow ovens. Hand soldering is precision temperature controlled irons, hot air rework stations, magnifiers, cameras, and exhaust fans. The tools are more complicated, more expensive, and better.
One of the lessons of surface mount work is that you really can move your fingers a thousandth of an inch. But you need magnification to see what you're doing.
I'm encouraged to see more hobbyists going surface mount. In my TechShop days, I was the only one doing surface mount. Everybody else was using 1980s 0.1 inch spacing DIP components. That's a US thing. If you learn to solder in Shenzhen, you start with surface mount.
Leaded solder is easier to work with for personal projects. Careful hand washing and handling is required, but it's easy.
I also recommend people go to surface mount, but I don't recommend beginners immediately go for expensive microscopes and reflow ovens. Stick to 0806 components or larger to start and you can populate a board without any binocular microscope or magnification as long as your eyesight isn't too bad. I can populate 0402 components without magnification all day long.
For small boards, reflow on one of those cheap hot plates. They're small enough to back in the drawer when you're done.
Surface mount doesn't have to be hard or expensive, unless you're doing designs with ICs that come in very fine pitch packages.
it really isn't if you use a nice modern lead-free solder. you'll need your iron to be about 20c hotter, but it's not like the early days of lead-free where it'd flow all weird.
A lot of initial soldering mistakes are from using incorrect temperature, not cleaning the surfaces with flux, or from using wrong tips.
You do get better rather quickly, especially if you ask for help!
I mean, a smell is temporary unpleasant but what happened to my health here? I am a former smoker, so I guess damage was previously done there.
This specific iron is a portable one (I had it hooked up on a powerbank), with temperature control and FOSS firmware. It was lead-free soldering tin with flux included. I held the item with my hands, so maybe it did get greased by skin oil, who knows. I had a lot of help from other more experienced people. They guided me through it, with a lot of patience. Without them, I'd been stuck way before. But even they were like... maybe this isn't for you.
My motor skills are just not that good (possibly related to my ASD or father having MS), and I notice that with everything where I gotta use my hands. From elementary school handwriting (learning to write) or even before with tasks like eating, putting clothes on, etc. That is as far back as I can remember. Ever onwards, things like sports. I am simply physically clumsy, and it requires a lot of effort and practice to get on a decent level. Can I do it? Can I hand write? Yes, I can. But it requires a lot of practice to get to a decent level. I can satisfy my wife with my hands though, probably my most important skill I am grateful for. No joke, btw. Although the fact I can, say, give myself food (eat) is probably more important, survival wise.
The one skill I would love to be able to achieve throughout my life, would be programming, not soldering. I mean, something like soldering is awesome, I am a sucker for right to repair, second hand, reusable hardware, etc something like programming comes close to, say, Lego. Though programming wise I am not sure nowadays, given AI. And there too, I tried VB, TCL, C, Java, Python. Multiple Python courses, too, from MOOC, books, to a professional teacher in a classroom. I've been (and am) able to make small adjustments to code, and do some shell scripting (and mIRC scripting, but that was roughly 30 years ago). That's it. That is without AI, I haven't bothered with that. I like to run LLMs locally.
Thermal mass is important, please have a look at my other post for a recommended tutorial set. Silver based solders like SAC305 will also stick to most plated pin types.
Sometimes people are given a BS fools errand, and convince themselves there is some hidden secret to workmanship. You would have been better off with a $25 30W Weller iron and $7 flux+Wick kit off Amazon for through-hole style PCB kits. =3
I paid like 40€ last week for 5 smaller PCBAs, 0402s all nice and correct, jumpers, all my ICs. Don't have to worry about diode orientation or solder bridges. Just complete boards shipped to me. Easily beats my own labour rates.
The annoying part is getting the bom and component placement files correct. I use kicad since it's free, and there's solid instructions from most houses on what they need.
There's also a suspicion that JLBPCB may be encouraged to do this by the Party, to discourage other countries from maintaining an independent prototyping capability.
But yeah, everything's smd now and stencils and PCBs are cheap enough there is little reson to not go that way
Still wash your hands after using lead-free solder by the way. You don't want to be eating rosin or copper either.
When I first tried my hand at soldering I was using the "butter knife" method: apply solder to the iron, then try to smear it onto the wire like spreading butter with a butter knife. Of course the solder would never stick to where I wanted it to go. I had to learn that solder goes to where the heat is, so I instead had to heat the components or wires instead and then feed the solder onto the hot components. I also had to learn that a soldering iron is not a pencil, sometimes even when doing small parts you want to use the large tip. Don't try to tell the solder where to go, instead apply a big blog and watch it snap into place on its own.
Last year I installed an HDMI mod[1] into my Wii, this has been so far the hardest project. It took me many attempts to get it right, mainly because I was working against the solder instead of with it. But now that I have succeeded I could easily do it over and over again (not keen on the disassembly and reassembly of the console though).
EDIT: while I'm at it I might as well mention the iron I was using: the Pinecil[2]. It's a really neat and fast soldering iron at a very cheap price. Great for people like me who don't want hardware store cheap garbage, but also cannot justify buying an entire soldering station.
[1] https://electron-shepherd.com/collections/kits-mods/products... [2] https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-solde...
Switching from a Weller to a Pinecil was also pretty nice although I'm sure everything I do, I could do with my analog weller.
It (a good proper flux) is what most people are missing when they struggle with SMD, the flux makes the solder almost magnetic and it jumps perfectly to the pad and the component. Mess up, make a bridge or bad connection? Add more and wave the tip through like a magic wand. Poof. Fixed.
Thanks for coming to my Church of Flux presentation.
Hacked the physical: pentastic!
Got the pump-wickin' stickin',
Who didn't turn off the bench?
Where's the 100x lens Gibson?
IC damage and bits of French
Master fine STM RPI ATM 329
Fuckin' A to the Zed
Fill your lungs with lead
Y'all shit's funded by
Venture rebrands for A&I.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieren_photography [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Air
Unleaded solder and a decent fume extractor make the process cleaner. A decent soldering iron and solder wire with good-quality flux (e.g. Kester) makes it faster.
If you'd rather not deal with the iron, you can manually apply solder paste and use a hot air rework tool or even a heat gun (careful!) to melt it. (A proper reflow oven is better, of course, but that's pricey.) This makes working with surface-mount components much easier.
If you'd rather not deal with it at all, have a PCB assembled somewhere else. JLC is pretty cheap, especially on simpler boards.
You can do a lot worse than a $55 temperature controlled hot plate. Plus you can watch the magic happen. Of course that only works for single sided boards. I've been very impressed with the results.
https://www.amazon.com/Soiiw-Microcomputer-Soldering-Preheat...
If you're impatient, plenty of fab houses (like JLCPCB) will do all the soldering for you, for about 0.1 cents per SMD joint or 2 cents per THT joint...
As long as you are not directly inhaling in the flux smoke while hovering over the project, it's not that unhealthy. If you are a hobbyist doing an hour of soldering a week, you probably get more smoke particle inhalation making toast. Or pizza. Or frying literally anything.
(If I was soldering for a living, yes I'd want a really good fume extractor on the bench, though.)
(as of 11:10pm PST 2026-05-11, I hasten to add)
Connectors tho... PITA
https://youtu.be/0LSG5uIdqJc?t=190s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUyetZ5RtPs&t=40s
Soldering with an iron:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvl_KYif9zA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RXugDd0xik
Drag soldering with a hoof tip iron:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUyetZ5RtPs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyele3CIs-U
Hot air techniques (mid size QFN, soic, and other SMD):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v58m-S35s24
Recommended equipment:
WE1010EDU for fine and medium work (remember the 3 second fillet rule)
https://www.amazon.com/Weller-WE1010EDU-Soldering-Education-...
A set of hoof and screwdriver tips:
https://www.amazon.com/Genuine-Weller-WE1010-Soldering-ETSET...
Flux and solder wick for cleaning pad areas on PCB:
https://www.amazon.com/Lesnow-Desoldering-Electronics-Disass...
CREWORKS 858D cheap hot air tool for basic SMD rework:
https://www.amazon.com/CO-Z-Soldering-Temperature-Desolderin...
1. never use metal wool to clean the iron tip coating
2. Before use, clean by dragging a hot iron across water dampened sponge (or paper) to smear off oxidized material.
3. Never use Bismuth solder, it was invented by fools for fools. Also, indium contamination can make you go bald.
4. Your iron should choose one (and only one) of the following
i. Sn63/Pb37 No-Clean eutectic solder for low temperature industrial machinery
ii. RoHS compliant SAC305 Lead-Free No-Clean Solder
5. No Clean means the flux core in the solder may be left on the work. However, it is recommended to clean it off with 99% IPA.
6. Fume extraction blows crud outdoors, and charcoal filters just makes crud smell nice.
7. Practice PCB kits are cheap, and getting 2 in case you cook something by inserting it backwards may be wise.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/soldered-electron...
Best of luck =3
It was a true splurge, but I love it. Warm-up in 15 seconds, and the tips are integrated with the heaters so there's no thermal contact to worry about. Tiny and big tips both work great. You can change tips while they're hot.
At home I have a typical Weller station, and it's OK for the electronics side business that I run, but nothing like that Hakko.
... and I love soldering.
But then I had a hardware startup and learnt something about myself.
I enjoy building one or two of something. I absolutely hate building anything more than that.