User:WillWare/Homebrew surface-mount construction
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Lots of people have figured out surface-mount construction techniques and tools that work on a very limited budget. Getting boards assembled by a professional assembly house can be expensive, because they will charge several hundred dollars to make a metal stencil. I've used an ISO-9000 board house in the past, and if I don't bring them paperwork that looks a particular way, they get antsy. So these techniques for soldering teeny fine-pitch parts are cool, especially with the deals one can get these days on small runs of prototype PCBs.
Hints, tips, advice, background info, encouragement from hams, piclist, gEDA mailing list, another ham, and sci.electronics.basics (Usenet).
The "right" way to do surface mount soldering, with the official tools...
You want quiet, lots of light, elbow room, and good magnifiers and tweezers. Good magnifiers can be found at arts-and-crafts stores. A microscope is a good idea - mine has 10x eyepieces and a switchable 2x/4x objective, and it's perfect for SMT work.
Practice is important, and it's a great idea to get a lot of practice without spending a lot of money. Solder, solder paste, irons and wick and toaster ovens are cheap, as are rolls of some 0805 and SOT-23 parts. For fine-pitch ICs with lots of pins, the cheapest I've found is the EPM3064ATC100 ($3.10 from Digikey) in a 100-pin TQFP package with pin spacing of 0.5 mm. I designed a little two-layer board that you can use for practice. Feel free to download the Gerber files.