I have been doing fine-pitch soldering for a long time. I do stuff as fine as 0.4mm lead pitch, which is a bit of a pain. The bulk of stuff I now make with a pick and place machine and a reflow oven (converted toaster oven with thermocouple ramp-and-soak controller). But, I still do a lot of prototypes and rework by hand. The MOST important thing is a stereo zoom microscope with a long working distance. A working distance of 2-3" is necessary to get your hands and a soldering iron under it. A ring light can be made from a ring of PC board material that fits around the snout of the microscope. Carve a ring in the copper of the PCB so it becomes two concentric rings. Use a 12 V DC wall-wart power supply and 8 while LEDs, with about 1 K Ohm series resistors. Make a piece of cardboard with a 1/2" hole in it, use this as a mask to isolate the light from one LED at a time and bend the LEDs so they all converge about where the viewing area is. This mask is for alignment only, store it somewhere as you will occasionally bump the LEDs and have to realign them. Solder braid can be used to remove excess solder bridging the leads, which WILL happen frequently. For big, high-density chips, this is my procedure: First, put a tiny dab of solder on 2 corner pads. Align the chip with the pads, and solder the corners that have the extra solder. Now, use a piece of solid wire to apply GC brand (or equivalent) liquid flux across the leads. Just dip the end of the wire into the bottle and then wipe it across the leads. If the board has enough solder plating, you may not need to add any solder, just use the iron to reflow the pad solder onto the leads. I generally add a little speck of solder every 4th or 5th lead as I go down the rows. I use .015" solder, the thinnest I seem to be able to get nowadays. You used to be able to get .010" fairly easily. I've probably done about a thousand of these now using this technique. It is probably best to wash off the flux residue later with solvent. Jon