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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I got this for soldering practice and it worked great. Exactly what I was looking for.

good

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!