People keep asking me what to buy to get into electronics repair as a hobby. Here's everything, collected in one place. This is all hard-learned over ~3 years of hobby work — I'm on my 3rd hot air station and 4th soldering station because I didn't do the research and didn't know what to look for. Don't be me. Buy the nice one up front if you can swing it; the good gear holds its value extremely well anyway.
One channel to watch before you spend a dime: NanoFix on YouTube. He reviews most of the stuff I suggest here (and the alternatives), and his workflow is worth copying.
Read /r/soldering, then get the Geeboon TC22. It's mid-priced (~$100) and genuinely pro-grade, and it uses JBC-style tips, which is what you want.
The other one you'll see recommended is the FNIRSI DWS-200 (also JBC-style tips) — the NanoFix guy swears by it. I'd still take the TC22: it's strictly better, and the DWS-200 has a reported voltage-leakage issue that's a potential safety concern. That's why I land on the TC22.
Tips: keep three on hand and you'll cover nearly every job —
- a C2 (workhorse)
- a knife tip
- a J-style (bent conical)
The single most important rule: get a station with the blower in the base, not in the handle. And get good UX — two knobs (airflow + temp), ideally with a digital readout of both.
- Skip the bulbous-handle units that build the blower into the handle. This is the trap: almost every hot-air station on Amazon is this style — Yihua, WEP, and a dozen other brands (e.g. the WEP 2009D-II). Avoid the whole category.
- The budget sweet spot is the Mechanic 957DW — blower in the base, proper airflow and temp knobs. On AliExpress it goes as low as ~$70, which is crazy good — but watch the voltage trap: in my experience the dirt-cheap ones turn out to be 220V-only, and the 110V version costs roughly 2× (~$120). Buy the one that explicitly says 110V. I ran a 110V unit like this happily and would have used it forever.
- On Amazon, generic base-blower units exist (e.g. the Soiiw) but rarely at a reasonable price — around ~$160. Don't bother at that price; the AiXun below is on Amazon too and is better in every way.
- The step-up, and what I run: AiXun. Both the H310D (~$200, 1000W) and the H314 (~$325, 1400W) are on Amazon now, so they're easy to grab. They're a genuine joy: enough power to remove or reflow big modern chips, but precise enough airflow and temperature that you can do fine SMD without blowing parts across the board — or melt hot glue and shrink heatshrink without cooking what's underneath. The quick-change nozzle system and stand make them effortless. Both are great; the H314 mainly buys you pro features (timed temp profiles for BGA rework, etc.) and a touch more power — honestly the $200 H310D would have been plenty for me.
- Get the angled nozzles. I strongly prefer the angled nozzles over the straight ones it ships with (NanoFix talks about this too). Buy authentic AiXun nozzles — you'll probably have to go to AliExpress for those; in my experience the generic ones don't fit right.
Why this combo is glorious: paired with a JBC-style iron, you can hot-swap both tips and nozzles mid-job and never get stuck waiting for anything to cool down.
Get a digital microscope. Andonstar makes cheap, reasonable all-in-one units with a built-in screen — I upgraded mine to a 10" model on a swing-out arm you can move out of the way and reposition easily, and it's great.
The better architecture, if you want to grow into it: a camera-style unit with a separate screen you mount yourself (go as big as you want), or one that outputs to a computer — that's the way to go if you ever want to stream or record. But if you're not streaming and just need to see your work clearly, an all-in-one Andonstar is totally fine.
Honestly, NanoFix's microscope series is a better reference than my opinion here — start there.
Get extremely precise titanium tweezers, both straight and bent. Get several different kinds and brands — every situation is different and having a bunch to choose from is clutch.
Get a PCB holder, and get the right kind. The good ones clamp the board in a frame that rotates 360° on an axis so you can spin it freely to any angle — that's what you want. The ones that are just clips on bendy arms are not great, in my opinion. The cheap rotating kind runs ~$20–35 and is everywhere — no need to hunt on AliExpress, plenty are on Amazon (e.g. the generic "Noah Adjustable PCB Holder" rotating clamp). That's totally fine to start.
The premium option is a different beast entirely: the Hakko Omnivise (I have two). It's not a rotating frame — it's a small board grip on a heavy, weighted base. That mass is the whole point: it holds the board rock-solid whether it's tiny or large, and it won't budge an inch — even more so if you run a pair of them. You can also adjust the height, so you can get underneath the board to hit it with hot air. The catch: it's effectively a ~$100 paperweight with a little grip on the side, so it's a real splurge. The 360° rotating clamps are the next-best thing if you don't want to spend that.
- A good bit set (iFixit, LTT, whatever).
- An electric driver like a Fanttik is nice to have.
- A drill with steel (HSS) drill bits is handy when you need to bore into plastic housings/cases.
- A Dremel (rotary tool) is great for cutting metal shields or plastic.
- An electric engraver / etching pen (Fanttik makes one) is handy for revealing traces (scraping back solder mask) or removing corrosion.
- An X-Acto knife.
Get a Brymen — specifically the nice blue EEVblog editions. I run two:
- Brymen BM235 (EEVblog blue) — 6,000-count, ~$100–130. The cheaper one, and still excellent.
- Brymen BM786 (EEVblog blue) — 60,000-count, ~$180–200. More precision; my higher-end meter.
Either is a great buy. What sells me on Brymen is the continuity mode — it's fast and sensitive, and it'll beep through slightly resistive connections, not just a dead short (up into the tens-of-ohms range — somewhere around ~50 Ω-ish). That makes buzzing out traces and catching intermittent faults much nicer than on a typical meter.
A scope is a solid nice-to-have. Get one with at least 2 channels (prefer 4) and 100 MHz bandwidth. Rigol, Hantek, Siglent are all great. A cheap 2-channel starter like the Hantek DSO2D15 (~$150) is a great way in — but if you can, spring for 4 channels: I run the 2-channel and regularly wish I'd gone 4. FNIRSI is better than nothing, but you mostly get what you pay for here — grab a cheap FNIRSI to tide you over if you must, and buy nice sharp probes.
A thermal camera has saved me more times than I can count — there's nothing faster for finding exactly which chip on a board has gone bad (it lights up hot). It's also genuinely useful for design: knowing whether the thing you're building runs hot matters a lot.
There are two styles:
- Phone-attached (what I run — a Seek Thermal CompactPro-ish unit): it plugs into your phone over USB-C and acts like your phone's camera, so you view on your phone's big, excellent screen and shoot pics and video straight to the phone. Mine has high resolution and framerate — I bought it for the specs — but the software is rough: it crashes a lot and the UI is less than ideal. (My exact model's been discontinued anyway, so I won't name a pick.)
- Self-contained (its own built-in screen): probably faster in practice — just point and use, instead of pull out the phone, plug in, launch the app, wait.
Either way, they're at pretty reasonable prices these days. Watch some YouTube reviews and buy one someone you trust vouches for — don't just chase specs like I did.
The thermocouple people sleep on: most quality multimeters — including the Brymens I recommend above — come with a thermocouple (a bead-tipped probe). Plug it in, switch to the temperature mode, and it reads the precise temperature right at the tip. It's not much help for finding a fault, but once you've found the problem it'll tell you exactly how hot something is. It's also a great sanity-check on the IR camera: thermal cameras can read wrong depending on how shiny/reflective the surface is (emissivity), so use the camera for relative temps and hotspot-hunting, and the thermocouple when you need an accurate absolute number.
Like with scopes, bench supplies climb into crazy-expensive metrology territory — but you don't need a calibration certificate on your bench. The cheap Chinese units (~$50 or less) are everywhere and do the job for almost every hobbyist use case. They're mostly the same handful of designs inside, so just pick the one with the best UI.
What to look for:
- Physical knobs, not buttons, on the front — separate controls to dial in voltage and current. (A bench supply runs in either constant-voltage or constant-current mode; you're setting a target for both.)
- Three terminals, so ground is separate from negative. That lets you float the output or chain supplies together — series for more voltage, parallel for more current — without tying your negative rail to earth.
- Power switch on the front. I hate having to reach around back to give a device the reacharound. Non-negotiable for me.
- A separate output on/off switch you can toggle without powering down the whole unit — so you can set your current limit with the output off, then flip it on. That's the big UX differentiator.
Watch the wattage. These are basically all capped around 300W, so you pick your poison: 0–30V / 0–10A or 0–60V / 0–5A. You can't get a cheap single unit that does, say, 100V and 20A — that's 2000W, and it'd melt into the floor. One gotcha: some budget units are secretly only ~150W inside and can't actually hold max voltage and max current at the same time, so check the real wattage rating, not just the V/A on the label. Honestly you rarely need more than 30V or 5A, so either split works — I lean toward more amps (USB-C PD officially tops out at 5A, though some proprietary chargers push a hair past it, so the headroom is nice).
Here's one I like a lot — it has everything above.
Get two. I keep two or three supplies, with two on the bench at any time. It's genuinely useful: you can run multiple rails at once (say 5V and 12V), or power two devices independently. I also use a bench supply to run random other stuff — like the pump that vacuum-seals my 3D-printing filament bags.
- 99% IPA (isopropyl alcohol)
- Chip Quik NC191 flux
- MG Chemicals Superwick — do not cheap out on wick
- A squeeze/dispenser bottle to distribute the IPA easily (NanoFix uses them — you'll see, super handy)
- Cotton swabs, Magic Eraser, lint-free cleanroom wipes, reusable microfiber cloths
- Spudgers, dental picks, plastic picks, etc.
- A kit of assorted SMD resistors, caps, etc.
- Assorted wire: 16 and 18 AWG stranded, plus 28 AWG solid-core enameled for PCB repair.
- A hot glue gun — or just buy the glue sticks and melt them with your excellent hot air station (you got one of those, right?).
- Double-sided tape, Kapton tape, aluminum tape (these are for protecting plastic near where you're working).
Get leaded solder, fairly thin — 0.5 mm diameter (0.6 mm in a pinch; 1.0 mm is thick enough to be annoying).
Go for eutectic 63/37 (63% tin / 37% lead). It has the lowest melting point of any tin/lead mix (183 °C) and goes straight from solid to liquid with no pasty "plastic" range, which makes it the nicest to work with — especially for fine/SMD work. 60/40 is also completely fine and extremely common; it just has a small slushy range (~183–191 °C), so a joint disturbed mid-freeze can come out cold. The one alloy to actually avoid is lead-free — higher temps, worse wetting, more of a pain for hobby repair.
(Notation note: the first number is always tin, the second is lead — so "60/40" is 60% tin, which is more lead than 63/37, not less. The reason 63/37 wins is that it's eutectic, not its lead content.)
Get UV-curing solder mask and epoxy — look specifically for the 3-second-cure stuff, don't just grab anything. Pair it with a high-power UV flashlight off Amazon (the kind rockhounds use).
Leaded solder and flux fumes aren't something to be casual about.
- Ventilation. I work in a garage with a big box fan blowing fumes away from me — fine for a space that size. If you're inside in a smaller room, that isn't enough; you really want a proper fume extractor. I won't try to spec one here — go with what NanoFix recommends.
- Wash your hands after handling leaded solder, and don't eat or drink at the bench.
- Wear nitrile gloves when appropriate.
- A pair of heat-rated soldering gloves (good to several hundred °C) is handy for hot-air work and handling hot parts.
Once you start working on line-powered equipment (switch-mode supplies, CRTs, vintage gear), two bench tools move from "nice" to "you really want these."
Isolation transformer. When you probe live mains gear with a grounded oscilloscope, the scope's ground clip is tied to mains earth — clip it to the wrong node in a non-isolated or "hot-chassis" device and you get a dead short or a shock, potentially frying the device, the scope, or you. An isolation transformer breaks the galvanic link to the wall so the device-under-test floats relative to earth, which is what makes it safe to attach a grounded scope. I got mine on Amazon, ~1000 W — plenty for bench work.
One gotcha worth checking: some cheap units don't pass the safety earth through to the output. Mine had the case earthed, but the ground pin on the output socket wasn't connected to the ground pin on the input — so anything I plugged in had a floating earth, defeating its safety ground. The fix is simple: bond the output earth pin straight through to the input earth pin — an easy internal solder job, confirmed with your multimeter's continuity mode. Important: you're only joining the earth pins. The transformer still isolates and floats live and neutral, which is the whole point — so check with your continuity tester that earth is now through and that neither output L nor N is tied to earth.
Dim bulb tester (current limiter). This puts an incandescent bulb in series with the live line to the device. On first power-up of a repaired or suspect unit, a short or excessive current draw lights the bulb brightly and drops most of the voltage — limiting current so you don't blow parts (or start a fire) while you diagnose. A healthy device lets the bulb settle dim or off after the inrush.
I was inspired to build mine by Learn Electronics Repair's dim-bulb-tester video on YouTube (current limiter build) — he walks through a schematic; I didn't copy it exactly, but used it as the jumping-off point. Mine has four bulb sockets, each with its own switch, so I can parallel them: with four 40 W bulbs I get current limits in 40 W steps up to 160 W (drop in bigger bulbs for more). An AC meter shows line voltage / current draw. I plug the dim bulb tester into the isolation transformer, so the whole rig is safe to probe with the scope.
For whatever devices you plan to fix, Google the 5 most common failures and stock those parts ahead of time. It's always better to buy bulk in advance. CMOS battery? A thermistor? A particular fuse? Even specific chips if you can still get them — often only $1–2 each, sometimes as low as $0.15 in quantities of 20–50 if you buy bulk.
Buy from DigiKey or Mouser. Only fail over to LCSC or others if you can't get the part there (tariffs are a pain these days, but DigiKey makes it pretty easy and predictable).
There's a class of stuff that's just extremely cheap and totally fine to buy on AliExpress — and a lot that's better bought elsewhere. Research and figure out which is which. Some things are only available on Ali, so sometimes you just have to risk it.
Honestly, I learned everything I know from two places: AI (Gemini, Claude) for quick answers and working through problems, and YouTube. These are the channels I trust:
- NanoFix — a professional repair tech doing extremely demanding modern-hardware work: rescuing botched Nintendo Switch "kamikaze" modchip jobs, laptops, the genuinely hard stuff. I've never seen a piece of advice from him I disagreed with.
- Learn Electronics Repair (LER) — old-school, and clearly does it for the love of sharing. He doesn't just show you how to fix X — he reverse-engineers the circuit and explains how it actually works. Genuinely enlightening.
- TronicsFix — retro consoles: SNES, Game Boy, that whole era. Another pro, and a trustworthy resource.
- Adrian's Digital Basement — old computers: PCs, Apples, Commodore 64s, and piles more. Bar none the best troubleshooter on YouTube — he walks you through his exact process and shows you every wrong turn.
- StezStix Fix — Steve's a gem. His everyman style — constantly insisting you not do what he does because he's "an idiot" — is endearing and educational; sometimes there's no better way to learn the right way than to watch someone do it the wrong way. The singing's excellent too.
Bottom line: do the research, buy the nice one once. I learned this the expensive way — three hot air stations and four soldering irons deep. The good gear holds its value, so the "expensive" path is often cheaper in the end.