[lelanthran]

I second this comment and it really should have been higher in the hierarchy - WTF are you going to do with an expensive setup that a lit magnifier and controllable iron (with interchangeable tips) can't?

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.

[Liftyee]

Hard to justify for a beginner? Sure.

"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.

[lelanthran]

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

Yeah, but that's the qualifier - "small enough parts". Go small enough and even an expensive iron isn't going to help you.

[peteforde]

Except that we're on HN so it shouldn't really surprise anyone that I'm using these "expensive" tools to solder and correct 0402 and sometimes 0201 parts.

Effectively impossible without a stereo microscope.

[sandreas]

I soldered a backlight fuse of a Lenovo T480s with a 35$ iron and a 10x magnifier, see [1] (german)

I'm not trying to proof you wrong but sometimes good enough will do. However, good tools are worth the money most of the time.

1: https://www.computerbase.de/forum/threads/t480s-backlight-si...

[peteforde]

I understand that you're trying to flex a bit to prove your point, but a 2-lead rectangular discrete and dead-bugging a QFN-24/28 are in entirely different spectrums of difficulty.

Edit: Apologies, in my head I was replying to a different thread. I would still say that if you're working at that scale you should deploy appropriate tools to make the job simple, fast and repeatable.

Doing work on extremely small parts without a stereo microscope offers extremely small returns once you've finished proving your point to nobody watching.

[peteforde]

This is a weird take to make before you actually ask the question.

I design and prototype devices for a living. I use a combination of reflow and hand soldering depending on which stage of the process I'm working through, and/or how much trouble I might be having with some aspect or another.

For example, there have been times where I've successfully dead-bugged QFN-24 to a PCB, allowing me to verify a fix and save myself several weeks and several hundred dollars.

All of these tools are only expensive in a vacuum. The moment you're relying on them to create products, and assuming you value your time correctly, you can see them for what they are: usually one-time fixed expenses that end up saving you thousands of dollars in board revisions that you never had to order.

Meanwhile, lots of people use cars as part of their job. Even a shit car costs many times what my soldering tools cost, and nobody would show up on HN to imply that they don't need a car.