Hi Carbies.
Hope everyone is well.
My son has showed great interest in electronics and robotics in high school and would now like to get himself a soldering and hot air station.
I'm not too clued up and would like to get something decent that he can learn with but also won't break the bank.
I have put up a wanted advertisement, but some advice on what to buy and where to buy from would also be great if I don't get anything on the forum.
Thanks
I know this comes a little late but bare with me.
Now for simple through hole single or dual sided boards you could essentially use a hair drier and and some metal scrap you picked up on the side of the road. (Jokes, please don't try this) but you really can get away with using the cheapest tools you can find, just match tip size to the size of the parts you're expecting the kid to be soldering, and hot air isn't really necessary.
The new pencil style irons are amazing for anything short of heavy multi-layer boards, works good on laptop motherboards but do struggle on high power GPU motherboards and PS5/Xbox Series X. There are a couple different standard designs for them; Pine64 ones are good quality but more expensive, Miniware has the TS100/101 which are good and decent pricing and then there are the Sequre ones like the SQ-D60 which are cheap but have worse build quality.
Their tips are replaceable, you pull the whole "cartridge" out and replace as they have the heating element in the tip closer to the point that you're working with which has the bonus of much better heat transfer but at an increased cost.
Hot air won't be required unless he wants to do SMD stuff and even then learning with the Iron isn't wrong because there are times when using the hot air isn't the best idea do to other components around what you're trying to solder/desolder.
The cheap hot air stations are blower in handle and are fine-ish if it's just to learn with but the non blower in handle stations are far superior, just not sure what the price difference in SA is.
DO NOT BE AFRAID OF LEADED SOLDER. It is going to be your friend. Unleaded melts at higher temps, is harder to work with and is more prone to failure/cold joins.