[dlcarrier]

How are you burning yourself? I've only ever worked with one person who burned himself soldering when working on a SMT PCBs, and it was while desoldering a through-hole connector, when a desoldering station was long past its cleaning interval and it dripped some solder onto a metal ring he was wearing. This was a guy who would lick a soldering iron to see if it was hot and touch the molten solder in the wave solder machine. The Leidenfrost effect goes a long way.

[alnwlsn]

My #1 way is from impatiently touching the board to see if it's cool enough to touch yet. That sounds dumb and it is.

More generally, with iron soldering only the iron and the last couple joints are hot. For SMD, there's more places for the heat to go; sometimes the entire board can be hot. Sometimes, you might need to balance being close enough in to get a good grip on the tiny parts, but far enough to not get burnt. You will feel the heat when SMD soldering - it's not always dangerous but another thing to pay attention to.

[dlcarrier]

I have been impatient, and pulled a board out of the reflow oven while it's hot enough to burn, but it's fiberglass and resin, so it has very low heat transfer, giving enough time to put it down, without getting burnt.

[retatop]

I do a lot of soldering at my day job to bodge boards, tune networks, etc. I burn myself on the time because when I'm working through the microscope I seemingly forget I have hands or lose track of them and bump the iron into them when pulling it away from the work. Not sure why, but it's really easy for me to get into this mode where the view through the scope is the only thing in the world

[Kiboneu]

An easy one is heat transferring through an SMD component to your tweezers, while trying to gently remove it from a heavy ground plane.