Gikfun DIY SMD/SMT Components Practice Board Soldering Skill Training Kit AE1173

This soldering practice board is a great way to build confidence with SMD/SMT work. The components are clearly laid out, and the board feels well designed for learning proper technique. It’s challenging enough to be useful without being frustrating. A solid, low-cost training kit for improving soldering skills.

Great quality little board. Cheap and effective for honing your skills with smd soldering. Various size components and ICs. I'm a noob, but with the right equipment, it'z easy enough.

Great product to practice soldering skills before starting a project Cheap and efficient, comes with different components so you can practice better

If you have never soldered a surface-mount component, then this kit is good practice. The only improvement I'd make is to include several larger components in the kit. The kit provides only the very smallest of components. A mixture of large and small components would have been nice. A common complaint is that this kit doesn't come with instructions. There are plenty of SMC soldering instructional videos online, so I saw no need to have instructions included with the kit. The kit provides an assortment of surface-mount components and a PCB. In my opinion, that's all you need for hands-on practice.

If you have had at least some experience with electronic soldering on larger, traditional through hole components but want to try your hand at SMD, then this is a great way to get started. This is a very high quality kit with a good assortment of different size parts to practice on. And very reasonably priced. For about the price of a movie, you can’t go wrong. And even if you make a few mistakes along the way while you are learning, it doesn’t matter because the kit was never intended to do anything constructive except teach you how to solder SMD joints. Having said that, it DOES offer some useful ways to check the quality of your work. If you hold the board up to a strong light, you can see the circuit trace patterns and use them to make some tests with a volt/ohm meter. For example, on the right side of the board, resistors 1-10 are connected in series and there are a couple of test points near R7 and R8 that you can use to check continuity on all 10 resistors at one time. Other test points connect to more complicated combinations of series and parallel networks and you will have to break out the calculator to figure out what the correct resistance, capacitance, etc. SHOULD be, but this is all stuff you need to know anyway if you ever intend to do troubleshooting on electronic circuits.

Seems to be as described. Disappointed, however, that no schematic (really low-cost item!) was included or even referenced. Would make the kit much more educational- and useful! As an engineer, I'll enjoy practice soldering, but component identification and relation to other included items would be most useful and informative. Instructions included should include more info on component identification, e.g. pics, values, relative sizes.

Excellent quality kit that has various surface-mounted components to learn and practice soldering skills. It took me some time to learn, and it withstood repeated soldering on and off to become good enough to attempt a repair on my vintage Macs. A very low price for what you get and really does what I needed. Highly recommend.

I have done a pretty fair amount of THT soldering but never surface mount, if I can solder these I'll be able to solder just about anything. I'll give more details after Christmas when I'll have a chance to try them out. If all goes well I'll update my rating. Right now I'm not sure. Well it turns out that this is a really good learning tool the parts are tiny and a challenge but not impossible. I made some mistakes but learned a lot, had a lot of fun and really got the hang of it. I may buy another one to get some more practice overall a good experience! As for instructions there are more than enough you tube videos if you need help. Anyone who couldn't find instructions just didn't look.

This was my first venture into smd soldering and gave me the practice and confidence to build a digital clock and fm radio kits afterwards.

Mein Sohn liebt das löten. Jederzeit wieder

Bueno Par aprender

These things are wicked small but damn is it good for practice

A good practice kit with a variety of components and sizes. There are lots of 0805 components to practice with and a few big chips too. I appreciate the bare pads that can be use to test continuity once you're done a block of components.