You might want one (or two) of those “Helping hands” things…. a pair of alligator clips on some pivots. It’s helpful when soldering stuff, since we only get two hands :). Something like this:
You’ll want solder, some flux, and some stuff to desolder, maybe braid or one of those solder sucker things.
I always find a small magnifying glass helpful (a loupe works well for me) and headlights.
One more: Shining Beam has a fairly inexpensive tweezer… used to unscrew various things using the prongs, plus you actually use them as tweezers to pick things up :)…
I do not know about that Elenco iron, but it looks like it has temperature control which is important. Question to ask is, can I buy new tips for it easily? Good thing about the Hakko clones is you can buy replacement parts for it, e.g. heating element, new pen (should you need to replace it), etc.
My only suggestion would be an auto-ranging multimeter rather than a manual-ranging one as suggested above. Though it’s much more expensive, but the convenience is superb.
I’ll piggyback off this thread… any better soldering stations than the 936 clone for under $50 shipped? Or is that the best you’re gonna get? I have a few other hobbies that require a soldering iron and I’m tired of the shitty 30w radioshacks lifting traces on vintage electronics. That could be a combination of OE and bad tips though.
Try the UT-61E, just make your own leads, short and thick, those they come with are not good as you measure in series of course you get a lot of resistance. At least the physical build quality of the DMM is top notch.
It’s been a long while since I’ve bought a new meter, but back then, I had generally been avoiding auto-ranging, because I use to hate that the readings on the meter would usually fluctuate for awhile before the auto-ranging kicked in and settled down.
I only have one auto-ranging multimeter (the one I linked) and the auto-range when measuring batteries voltage takes less than a second. I didn’t feel there was a “delay” at all. I’m not sure about other multimeters or higher-ends ones (I think there are higher-ends one like Fluke that would take some time to settle.)