That sucks! I assume that amount of jitter prevents you from doing most fine soldering? Including the type of intricate airwiring require to add a resistor, two caps, a transistor, and a diode to a small 15mm driver, regardless of whether they are through-hole or SMT? That is a lot of components to add to such a small thing.
I have workarounds, they just take a lot of time. I can make joints on small stuff, my issue is that I can’t avoid shorting pads on a PCB nearly as easy. My plan was to airwire the parts and then airwire them into the circuit. There is only one spot where I actually have to solder onto something other than a ground point, the battery positive spring, or the LED- so there is some space for forgiveness here. MK1 of the circuit will be on a breadboard. Through hole stuff gives me more space to take a razor saw to any shorted leads. I suspect that half my issue is that my soldering iron is bad. We are talking 10 year old tip, 25 watt iron that has faded to 15 watt, and mixed solders. Some of the solder I’ve had to use for the big stuff is so aggressive that it can eat a hole in the tip (I’m nearing the point where I just throw everything away and start over, it is that bad).
I have a newer variable power iron NIB, but I can’t seem to find any reliable guides and I refuse to ruin yet another tip by using it wrong. I know the iron is supposed to heat the items intended to be soldered together, but I at least have some decent solder.
One of the items on my todo list is to rig up an exhaust fan so that I can solder at a desk that is at the right height so that I can neutralize some of the jitter.
Standard 60/40 rosin core solder is what you want. Your local Radio Shack of Fry’s Electronics will carry it. There should be no reason to use acid-core. A wide range of temps will work. Is the new iron variable wattage or temp controlled? A temp controlled iron will tremendously increase your mileage on the tip.
Have you considered reflow soldering? I’m not sure it’s a great suggestion in this case (it doesn’t really sound like a great one), but you know your limitations and are a better judge. In that case you take a blank PCB and lay down solder paste on it, some members such as DBCstm normally use a stencil. Then you place components on the paste (this is the part I suspect might be trouble for you). If you make a mistake you can wipe the paste off and start over… but it just doesn’t sound like a practical solution here. I thought I’d better mention it just in case. You also don’t have any fumes to worry about so you can do it at any height or whatever, then carefully move the PCB to your reflow area.
Please keep us posted as you build MK1 on the breadboard. 
New iron is constant power. I’m considering selling it on craigslist and getting this: Radio Control Planes, Drones, Cars, FPV, Quadcopters and more - Hobbyking
Even though the large diameter solder eats away at the tip, it is labeled rosin core. I’m using almost nothing but 62/36/2 right now because that is the only solder I have that doesn’t eat at the tip (bought it for using with a cold heat iron, discovered that running NiMH cells in a cold heat causes it to melt from excessive power, discovered that it makes for extremely good joints with a regular iron.)
No reflow access. I used to have access to two hot air desoldering/rework stations, but both places went under.
I need a sharper tip I think.
IMO a good tip is the small chisel tip that often came with the Hakko FX-888. (T18-D16) It’s small enough to get the job done but has a little more mass than the sharp conical tips.
I’d definitely see about getting a few bucks out of that constant power setup and going with a temp controlled one. I’ve been super happy with my (discontinued) FX-888 and despite the shortcomings I’m confident that I’d have been about as happy with the newer FX-888D. If your budget can’t swing $95 shipped, the Yihua 936 seems like a really strong contender at$35 shipped. It would probably be best to plan on replacing the stock Yihua fine tip with a genuine Hakko tip from Sparkfun or somewhere else trustworthy.
I have never had a problem with rosin core solder damaging my tip once I switched to a temp controlled station. I’ve had two temp controlled stations and had no tip damage on either.
As far as reflow… I do mine with a hot air gun. I use a rebranded Wagner 1500W heat gun (sold as Milwaukee) just like this one. DBCstm uses a little round slab of stainless steel he picked up for free from his local welding shop, he just sets it on the stove!
I got the circuit to do it’s first goal: Shut off power to the mode ic for a short amount of time. Now just to get it to be triggered reliably by the strobe.
It needed a high vF diode between the power supply and the circuit.
Looks like 5mm LEDs are useful again.
The extra long length of the strobe phase is because I’m using the driver to switch the ground for the P60 dropin, thus there is an excessively large mode memory capacitor that I haven’t gotten around to pencil modding because the entire driver is being powered through the + lead on the LED. Total solder connections required: 0.
[video:!http://youtu.be/0ucKsr5qJA8]
Hah, pretty sweet!
I swapped out D1 from a red LED to 2 diodes in series, now it works at a lower voltage reliably.
WIP of circuit for ultrafire F13 driver so that I can figure out how to keep part count down: Circuit Simulator Applet–1–0.5599599959168495–0.6116638838084727+100.0%0AR+208+160+208+48+0+2+5000.0+5.0+0.0+0.0+0.1%0Aw+288+256+288+272+0%0Aw+288+272+208+272+0%0Aw+208+272+208+336+0%0Ac+208+336+240+336+0+4.7E-5+3.699604330551267%0As+208+160+208+192+0+1+false%0Ac+320+144+320+272+0+1.0E-6+0.6120577032606414%0Ar+320+272+400+368+0+10000.0%0Ao+19+64+0+35+5.0+9.765625E-5+0–1%0Ao+12+64+0+35+5.0+0.00625+1+–1%0A