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.

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.

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.

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...

[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.

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...

Venture rebrands for A&I.

(as of 11:10pm PST 2026-05-11, I hasten to add)

Connectors tho... PITA

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.