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

Highly affordable, and served as a great way to prepare me for fine electronics soldering.

First time soldering this type of small parts. I found that the solder paste worked best for me.

Everything is connected with everything on the board, so if you want to check for bridges and such, you have to cut traces first. Otherwise it's a pretty neat practice board.

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.

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.

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.

Used this to practice my soldering skills. This is really nice as it let's you practice multiple different Solders you'd find on a board.

My husband is getting his electrical certification, this is a needed tool for class. He says it works perfectly for whatever the heck it's used for... yay!