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.

There is a similar vibe with TIG welding as well.

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!

Also apparently the word solder comes from Middle English 'soudure' which doesn't even have an L in it.

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.

# 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.

Still wash your hands after using lead-free solder by the way. You don't want to be eating rosin or copper either.

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.

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)

Custom PCBs are even cheaper here than in North America, and longer workdays meant I had less time for hobbies. That probably made me double down on my choice.

I don't own much fancy equipment, just a cheap hot air rework station. I've found that mixing in fresh gel flux into my solder paste to get the right consistency made a big difference, enough that I never really needed more tools.

After doing that, I just sort of smear some near-ish the pads (perversely, often using a THT resistor), drop the parts in approximately the correct position with tweezers, and heat it up gently. Surface tension handles the rest. Once in a while, an 0402 resistor shifts out of position, but otherwise it just works. I'd probably need better tools for BGA.

What I love best is that SMT microcontrollers can be very, very cheap. I like the attiny10 (36$ for 100 computers! What a wonder!). There are plenty that are under 10 cents each, but I rather like AVR assembler, and their datasheets are very good.

But yeah, everything's smd now and stencils and PCBs are cheap enough there is little reson to not go that way

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...

[1] https://github.com/Hypfer/valetudo-dreameadapter

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.)

They even come with these compatibility wikis of what PSU or bank to buy.

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.

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.

And copper plumbing is super common for potable water?

And plenty of spirits are distilled in copper stills?

I mean, encouraging handwashing is fine but copper isn't what you need to worry about.

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 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!

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

"Can't tell the difference?" is not true, once you're dealing with small enough parts.

Can I use a magnifier to solder 0.4mm pitch parts? Sure. Would I prefer a binocular microscope? 100%, every time. Both usable, not the same.

Small, silent and reliable for cheap money.

I did some minor mods and use these de-makeup cotton pads because they are cheaper but so far a great experience.

Another important note: don't go cheaper here. These manual desoldering pumps (<30 bucks) are pretty bad and the other zd-... Arent worth the money.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It has a 240W power supply, so it's not just marketing.

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.

Flux core solder is crap. It doesn’t contain enough flux to begin with and since it’s inside the solder, it can’t actually do the work it’s supposed to. You need to apply flux separately before soldering, and lead-free solder used to be harder to work with. That’s the leading mistake I’ve seen frustrate beginners.

Steady hands aren’t a requirement unless you’re doing very complex repairs like threading wire through a BGA grid. You’re supposed to use the surface tension of the solder to snap the component’s pins to the PCB pads. After you snap two corners to the pads, you can just glide a tip with some solder over the rest of the pins and the heat and flux do the rest of the work (the flux’s main job is actually changing the solder’s surface tension to make this easier and more predictable).

In general the formulation is more important than the brand, and the formulation isn't /that/ important either. If it's lead free, has a rosin core, and comes on a spool, you can probably use it.

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

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.

Metcal Fixed Temperature Induction soldering irons. Still the gold standard after decades because instead of using PID with a heating element and sensor, it exploits the curie effect. The tips are made of a special alloy that is only magnetic until a certain temperature after which it doesn’t absorb any more energy from the PSU, which just dumps a constant 25Mhz signal into the tip keeping it at the fixed temperature.

When their patents expired a couple of engineers went and founded Thermaltronics, which makes the same soldering iron (they’re even tip compatible!) for 2-3x cheaper. They’re still more expensive than hobbyist soldering irons but well worth the cost for anyone doing a lot of soldering. The power supplies are beasts though so you can easily pick up a 20 year old unit for a couple hundred bucks on ebay and it’ll run till the apocalypse comes home to roost.