I am posting a picture of my bench / work area below. Yes, some of the equipment is decent or getting into the more high end stuff, but the majority is well rounded daily items that you get a feel for as your skills progress.
You could probably see the slimline soldering pens towards the back of the rubber mat and those have become my go to along with a slim chisel style tip. I’d recommend that kind of tip for > 95% of the repairs that most people will do. I have an extremely tiny tip that I actually need to remove and replace a fuse the size of a poppy seed, but those are the exceptions.
As you could see, I use a more-or-less basic microscope and it actually does the job well. I went through various magnifying devices before I found this, but it’s all about finding what works for you and it doesn’t have to be expensive.
Other than the oscilloscope, bench multimeter, and signal generator; nearly everything on my bench is valued under $100 and was likely sourced on Amazon. Just get into doing and practicing, and you’ll find and figure out what works best for you. Being able to see the work area when dealing with microsoldering is all you need as the rest is time and materials.
You’ll want proper solder paste, tubes of flux specifically for this (and they work great on the big stuff too), UV mask with light and thin copper wire to repair broken traces, and Kapton tape. Note the array of items in my blue dispenser on the left as those will be used most often. You’ll also want a proper “solder sucker” and I would strongly recommend the one by the Engineer brand that’s made in Japan. You can’t go wrong with their products. I personally never had a need for BGA stuff, but that said, get yourself a good blower or blower station to control hot air flow.
Finally, as we told you, lead-based solder is king, so use it, but make sure to filter your air. If motherboard repair is your thing, a digital logic pen would probably be a solid investment, and you should be able to do most repair with the equipment shown. Experience and technique are far more important though, so just practice until it becomes second nature. It’s both an art an a science!
The way I see it, if you could find an inexpensive microscope that works for you, if it does fail, it’s cheap enough to easily replace without worrying. I think it’s a good thing. I probably tested many of those products that you see on Amazon and rarely find anything significant that would prevent me from giving it a recommendation. Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions and I could try to answer them for you. I first started with electronics professionally nearly 30 years ago, but segued towards computer engineering along the way. Right now microcontrollers are my thing, but everyone seems to discover their niche.
Be well.
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