It's also shockingly easy to just get boards made and populated these days. I of course have a station but I use it less and less.
I paid like 40€ last week for 5 smaller PCBAs, 0402s all nice and correct, jumpers, all my ICs. Don't have to worry about diode orientation or solder bridges. Just complete boards shipped to me. Easily beats my own labour rates.
Where did you buy your populated boards from? I want to make a small in and not deal with SMT at all.
I use jlcpcb, they're common in the prototype and hobby domains. But there's quite a few board houses in taiwan and china that do this, definitely shop around.
The annoying part is getting the bom and component placement files correct. I use kicad since it's free, and there's solid instructions from most houses on what they need.
JLBPCB does small runs cheap as a loss leader, so they get the production runs, if any, later. Also, they get to see what people are doing, in case something interesting goes by.
There's also a suspicion that JLBPCB may be encouraged to do this by the Party, to discourage other countries from maintaining an independent prototyping capability.
Ah, really interesting points, thanks. It definitely seems too cheap to be true.