Picking up the solder iron

May 13, 2026

A lot of enthusiastic and kind people on the internet will lead you to believe that it does not take much to start soldering. You’ll read that all you need to start is a soldering iron and solder which could just run you $20 on Amazon. That, plus a couple of YouTube/TikTok videos, and you’re set! Really appealing, right? They aren’t wrong — but that is just the absolute bare minimum. Don’t be fooled. You will most inevitably screw up the first time and it won’t be pretty. Oh, and you won’t have the stuff to desolder your mistake.

The entry-level stuff like cleaning up old units with IPA and swapping shells and buttons is very approachable, followed by maybe blobbing on one or two blobs of solder to swap out screens and speakers. But to get to the real interesting stuff you have to be able to do much more advanced soldering (and desoldering), and the modding community will not sugar-coat this. As open as the community is with all the wealth of information that is available, there are big warning signs on open-source GitHub repos and even printed on physical hardware mods that are distributed to caution all those who dare try.

The much more interesting mods are those that involve being able to attach or remove components from motherboards, or really salvaging the truly junk and damaged motherboards. The full swaps or restorations of very corroded boards into both gorgeously restored and functional machines that can run for another decade is a sight to see. Or at least, that would be the intent. The most extensive reworks involve transferring donor components from old units to new motherboards that have improved upon circuitry.

This involves much more advanced desoldering and transferring onto new boards and soldering. Not to mention some of these components and pins are so incredibly tiny that they require a microscope to feel confident about the quality of your work.

Initially I browsed around and found some fairly affordable little kits that you can purchase to practice soldering different types of components onto printed circuit boards (PCBs). These components included:

  • Through-hole parts — larger capacitors, resistors, ports.
    • Technique: classic beginner’s soldering — heat up a single pad at a time and feed the solder.
  • IC chips — CPU/RAM chips with rows of pins on two or four sides.
    • Technique: drag soldering.
  • SMD components — e.g. 0603-size package resistors, capacitors, etc.
    • Technique: solder iron, hot air, solder paste, hot plate.
  • QFN packages — chips with both a flat underside and pins on the sides that require soldering.
    • Technique: hot air, solder paste, hot plate.

These kits looked like a great resource, but I found that the best thing was actually finding a few old printers left out as e-waste. I was fortunate enough that I found some waiting to be picked up by waste management and took them home and just went Office Space on them.

These old printers would yield about 2-3 really good boards that had a fair amount and variety of components for me to practice desoldering — which arguably can be an even more challenging task since you don’t want to damage any donor components. (Also, possible free SMDs for later use!) Desoldering usually involves using copper-braided desoldering wick and a solder iron, and/or low-melt solder paste and hot air, to remove components safely without damaging them for transfer. These old parts allowed me to get comfortable with my tools and materials.

But of course, I’ve still had lots of failures. There were lots of frustrations that I realized — my hot air station is much slower (weaker, lower quality) than those proper ones used in all the instructional videos. Mine is the fan type rather than the piston type. PCBs harvested had components on both sides, were thick and multilayered, very robust with a lot of heat dissipation, and required a lot more time/heat distribution to remove components. This was not ideal for plastic components like FFC connectors (ribbon pin cable). I did not initially have the right tools for picking up chips as they loosened — I only had tweezers and a pry tool that would damage pins. I realized this a lot, and shopped around for the right stuff frequently.

I persisted and managed. I figured out what size nozzle, temperature, and airflow was optimal for my unit, and also used a hot plate when able. I removed components on the underside and placed the board on a hot plate to pre-heat the surface under the chips for better heat distribution from below in addition to the hot air I was applying from above. Bought more tools. A mini suction tool on the chips was really useful. A thin-edge spatula tool on chips with flat sides is very helpful.

So that’s taking things apart — now to attaching things. The newer IPS screen replacements and flashcarts (cartridges with microSD cards for ROMs/homebrew) are incredibly power-hungry, and in order to better power the units a new power regulator board is needed. BucketMouse, one of the most well-known developers in the scene, has set the expectation that anyone who wants to build his modern Game Boy Pocket Color (which requires micro soldering, desoldering donor parts, and drag soldering components) should first build his power regulator as a litmus test — and also to understand how to test it. His documentation on his projects is also extensive and incredibly helpful.

There exist many open-source power regulators. The first one I chose to build was Skimzor’s SZ regulator. Admittedly because it had a plain front face and the fewest components to source, and I also wanted to try my hand at a QFN package — which is considered a difficult package to solder. As a newcomer to the scene, this was the most rewarding thing for me to build, and exciting to see it display ~5V properly on a multimeter.

Tools I’ve been using (2026)

Tools I’ve been using (2025)

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