Hi, Soldering 0603 sized stuff isn't really hard, I just soldered about 40 of them this afternoon. Here's how I do it: - Put some solder on the solder pads - Pick up the resistor/capacitator/... with tweezers and place it on top of the pad - Heat up one pad - Wait 1 sec, you can now let go of the tweezers, the part is in place - Solder the other side by heating it too Soldering SOIC ICs is even easier, just put solder on the first pad and on the pad most diagonal to it (so, if you have an 8-pins IC, put solder on pad 1 and 5). Now just place the IC on top of the pads with the tweezers and heat up the 2 pins which have solder underneath them. Then just solder all the other pads separately. This won't work for ICs with smaller pin spacing (TSSOP, ....). To solder them I suggest first soldering down 2 pins, just like the SOIC IC, but then just apply lots of solder to the pins. Once all the pins are covered in solder, take a solder wick and remove all the solder, that will leave you with a perfectly soldered IC without solder bridges or anything. For LCC packages (the ones without pins) the beginning is a bit harder since you can't put solder on the pads and press then pins down on it with your soldering iron since there aren't any pins. Take the IC with tweezers and put in on top of the pads. Now take your soldering iron and put some solder on it's tip. Now just "stroke" the LCC "pin" up and down until the solder sticks to it. If it doesn't work after 5 secs, let the IC cool down a bit and try again with new solder, maybe with a bit more, you can always remove excessive solder with a solder wick. It's weird in the beginning, but once you get the hang of it, you can do this pretty quickly. I don't use any special kind of tools. My solder tip is a 1.3mm chisel (not sure though, it's the one Metcal suggests for regular SMD soldering). I use 60/40 solder, but that only because the store didn't have 63/37 in stock (in fact they never even heard of it.... go figure). I also wrote a tutorial about soldering SMDs a few months ago, it's here: http://members.lycos.nl/anthonyvh/index.php?page=smd. There's nothing in there that I haven't told here, but you might want to check it out for the pictures. I hope this helps! Anthony Website: http://members.lycos.nl/anthonyvh --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist