Having seen how small some of the capacitors are that came in form my Macintosh LC restoration (re-capping), I think it prudent to try out at least one of the SMC practice kits. I opted for this SMD Soldering Practice board picked up from amazon.
The component packages for some of these are tiny (yet still not the tinniest possible). Packages 1206, 0805, 0603 and 0402. A number of these pinged across the bench to be lost for ever. Still, these are smaller than I will need on the old computers, so if I can get this working without cooking the components, I should be good to restore rather than destroy my old Mac.
The instructions that come with the kit, weren’t great, but this Instructables article helped: SMD Soldering Practice Kit, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cheap Chinese Kit.
After completing the soldering, and powering up, I found two LEDs did not light up. The first was resolved by re-soldering the CD4017 (the larger of the ICs on the board). The second was found using the multimeter to discover that R53 had failed open. Whether it was just a bad resistor, or I had damaged it in soldering to the board, I don’t know. Fortunately the kit contains a few spares, and replacing the resistor brought the second LED to life.
