@Felthry I dunno what's ideal but this station is a well-regarded budget unit and seems fine https://www.tequipment.net/Quick/957DW+/Desoldering-Equipment/Rework-Stations/

and this paste also seems fine
https://www.tequipment.net/Chip-Quik/SMD291AX/Solder-Paste/

@starkatt that soldering station looks like a rebranded Yihua, and Yihua are usually pretty good for the price point from what we've heard!

i think we'd probably go for different paste, because we prefer to use lead-free when possible, but might try that for initial experiments since 63/37 is always nicer to work with. will have to do some research for what alloys are good for paste because i'm sure it's not the same as for wire solder, but SAC305 is probably fine
-F

@Felthry different air stations are needed for lead-free 'cause the temperature is so much higher.

@starkatt ah, that one doesn't go up high enough?

for soldering with an iron you can usually use the same station for either because it's adjustable (or in some cases like metcal or weller's magnestat--both of which are *really cool systems* by the way--you only need to change the tip, not the station), so it didn't occur to us that that might be a limitation with hot air

unless you use a bismuth solder i guess, but bismuth solder sucks
-F

@starkatt oh yeah out of curiosity what kinds of packages have you been able to solder with it? have you done anything with a big thermal pad? or something really hard to do by hand like QFN or something?
-F

@Felthry so far I did some 0603s and some sot223 on the board from my last project.

Feeling like I'd be fairly confident doing 0402 for passives at least. Hard to know about QFN et al without actually trying but I suspect it'd be fine.

@starkatt we can do 0603s and SOT223s just fine with the iron we use at work (which is a really nice micro iron from weller, 0603s would be awful with an fx-888d or something) but 0402 would be nice. The main thing we're interested in is QFN and thermal pads, but it sounds like it could make things easier for SSOP, QFP, and MSOP too

i think we will look into this
-F

@Felthry I'd done the SOT223 by hand just fine when I did the original project, but hot air was a lot easier :)

Being able to do thermal pads better is one of the big things I'm excited for.

@starkatt and yeah we're not looking for ideal, because the ideal probably costs like $10k and we're not going to be getting that for ourselves or convincing our boss to get it for work

but good enough is fine
-F