The Best Soldering Station?

We were lucky enough to have a hand-crafted french cleat wall, built by the super talented Robby Holb, at the North Boulder Library Makerspace. One absolutely awesome thing Robby did was help me (and by "help me" I mean take a vague idea I had and then fully realize it) create soldering workstations for my soldering workshops that kept supplies organized and easily transportable. I can't find the original post anymore, but I was initially inspired by a video that Vulpestruments posted years ago of a soldering iron + french cleat solution.

This is what our french cleat wall looked like at the start of our "Electronics Studio" - a 3-month deep dive into electronics topics in the Makespace.

Here's a closer look at the soldering stations that Robby created.

Robby asked me to give him all of the items that I'd want included in one of the stations. I gave him: the soldering iron, a solder spool, soldering iron tip cleaner, helping hands, and then some extra notions: pliers, a smaller solder spool, desoldering tools, tweezers, etc.

The helping hands, iron, spool, tip cleaner, and notions holder are all securely attached to the station with hardware so putting things back where they belong is much easier (because there's less that can actually move around), and keeping things tidy and organized is also much easier.

This made setup and cleanup for soldering workshops such a breeze. I just had to pick the stations up, and plop them down on the tables. A dream come true! Then, I'd set up some extra items like the silicone mats to protect the tables, and some extra fume extraction/ventilation units.