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by mng2 3064 days ago
Agreed. Being a human pick and place for anything more than low tens of parts is incredibly unfun, and paying someone to manufacture one or two doesn't really make sense. I don't care if it takes a few days, I'd rather not be sitting for hours wearing down my fine motor skills and eyesight.
1 comments

If it takes more than an hour to place the components, your solder paste will likely flow all over the board and it will be pointless to reflow it.
That's not a big concern for prototyping. It will reflow just fine. There might be a few solder balls rolling around afterward, maybe a bridge or two. Most of the time, this means your stencil apertures were too big, or that the cut-rate Chinese solder paste wasn't the bargain that it looked like on AliExpress.

Slump is a problem if you're trying to run a six-sigma process in a factory, of course, but that's not what's being discussed here.