If your boards are single sided and smaller parts (eg. no big chonky inductors or connectors), the skillet method works really well. It has much better visibility than the toaster oven method so you can easily see when your board is done. For small boards, I have a hot plate at work that is used specifically for this purpose (I also have access to an industrial 6-zone reflow oven there as well, but will often just hot-plate smaller boards when making prototypes).

I do recommend using a stencil and no-clean solderpaste. I use a laser cutter at work to cut stencils out of mylar, but I've also milled them out of brass shim stock from McMaster using a V-bit and you can also just order them from oshstencils for pretty cheap if you are in the US (the shipping is more than the stencil if out of the US). Anywhere in the 3-mil to 5-mil (1mil = 1 thousandth of an inch) range for thickness is a good place to start.

One note about solderpaste - it's just like heat sink grease... if you get some on your hands and wipe them on your pants, you will just have it on your hands AND on your pants.

Some other folks mentioned a stereo microscope, and I will add my vote for that as well. I liked the ones at work so much that I bought my own for home. I usually add a Barlow lens, which is an add-on objective lens that screws in on the bottom of the scope. A 0.5X Barlow lens will cut the magnification in half, but it also doubles the focal length. That gives a lot more room for a soldering iron and hands, and it's removable if you need the magnification back.

I've also used video microscopes and those work reasonably well, but the stereo vision makes it much easier to see things in 3D. I also solder through-hole components under my microscope and do SMT component placement with tweezers under it as well.

I prefer the "Zoom" style of stereo microscopes, but they are more expensive. My home unit is an AmScope brand with widefield eyepieces and a 0.5X Barlow lens and I paid around $400 for it. It's a big investment, but it was worth it for me and I use it for non-electronics things too.

I hate imposing on anyone to do what I used to be able to do on my own.

What you are referring to is the reflow that the PCB house applies to exposed, bare copper. The usual reflow alloy, if not building to RoHS specs, is HASL, which is a near-eutectic tin/lead alloy, approximating 63/37 solder (be sure to specify HASL if you are manually soldering your creation). During reflowing at the point where liquidity is achieved, the solder carried in the solder paste will combine with the HASL to form the finished joint, ideally producing a nice fillet where the pin meets the pad.

gloves like the kind your proctologist wears while probing your nether regions.

Back when everything was through-hole, wave soldering was a widely-used production method. If they are having warpage problems, they have a bad setup.

What Chad described doesn't sound like wave soldering. Instead it sounds as if the entire board is lowered all at once onto the flat surface of undisturbed molten solder in a vat. But AIUI wave soldering means the PCB isn't exposed all at once. Instead it gets wetted from one end to the other by a wave that's somehow produced on the surface of the liquid solder. (I'm guessing the wave is maintained in one place and it's the PCB that moves. Doubtless a video of this could be found online...)

-- Jeff

That’s a good question. However, it could be some parts are more readily obtained in through-hole packages, or are cheaper, or...

I'm also looking at AmScope... do you mind sharing the model/configuration you opted to buy? I've been using a Luxo magnifying lamp, which does pretty good for larger SMT devices, but as I get into the finer pitch parts, a stereo microscope will be much better.