Last night I posted a fairly extensive Instructable on how use a hot plate to solder extremely small surface mount devices (big ones also, BTW). This was inspired by the SparkFun Tutorial on using an electric fry pan. To control the temperature, I created a PWM controller using and ATtiny2313. All the code and the schematics are included.
Folks on this forum may find it of interest. The Instructable is here:
Last week, I successfully soldered a QFN part using that technique. The only hard part was getting the right amount of solder paste on the pads. I wasn’t using a stencil - that would have made things easier.
Thanks to SFE for posting the tutorial. I’d still be soldering this stuff by hand if it weren’t for that.