I use hemostats and pointy tweezers, mostly hemostats. Curved ones usually, large and small. Also, old-school alligator clips can be helpful if you need to “clamp” a part in place, but they’re hard to find and tend to “swallow” small parts.
You can wind a rubber band around the middle of your tweezers or hemostats to give yourself a “3rd hand” with adjustable grip.
Using a piece of coat-hanger or other stiff wire, take two turns around the shaft of a Phillips-head screwdriver, then cut off & bend the ends to meet each other, bend so they fit where you need them & maybe smash the tips with a hammer or vice-grip… Dittos for the rubber band if needed. Nicest wee clamp you’ll find, since you made it to fit.
I added a section to my first reply you may also find helpful:
On your clean soldering iron tip, get a wee droplet of solder to hang off the end. Now get your part in place & use the droplet to both carry heat into the joint and to provide the solder for the joint. It will flow off the tip when the joint is hot enough. Like having a drop of paint on the tip of a brush & not wiping it off but letting it flow onto the canvas… I can’t really describe it, but you’ll see it. That will at least keep you from having to hold the solder AND the iron AND the part AND the component all at the same time.
Oh, and if Super Glue isn’t helping, try the newer Super Glue for Wood. SG itself isn’t made to fill gaps, so that may explain why you can’t get your chips to stick together. SG for Wood fills & would solve that problem. Make sure you let it harden before you try to solder over it.
Bridging gaps with solder vs. herding cats? I’d rather herd cats.
For bridging stars on a Nanjg-105, I use a wee piece of wire, scrounged from Cat6 Ethernet cable. This is MUCH easier to solder & if I ever actually need the SOS, it’ll be much easier to cut the wire than to get all the solder off. I tin the tip of the wire, lay it in place, then use the drop-on-tip trick to stick it. Then cut off the excess with Flush Cutters. That same trick may work with 7135s, especially if you glue them down first. You could use one or two of the strands of any stranded copper wire.
You can put on two or more sets of reading glasses to get even more magnification. Don’t ask me how I know that!
If you shake as badly as I do, you can arrange to work next to a small piece of wood. Use it as a rest/fulcrum for the hot shaft of the iron as you work.
Cleaning up excess solder, you can use a “Solder Sucker”, a wick, or take a drinking straw in your mouth & when the solder is hot enough to flow DO NOT SUCK, but blow hell out of it. Aim the blow in a safe direction, obviously. What few dingleberries stick will usually be easy to knock off. Obviously that’s not the best idea, but it works in a pinch.
The over-the-counter “sleep aid” pills can settle the shakes if you can’t, but I have learned to work with the shakes over the years.
Hope that helps some & I’ll pop back with anything else I can think of.
TTFN.