Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Homebrew PCBs

Soldering fine-pitch ICs is a bit easier if you plan ahead and make the
copper pads on your PCB stick out a bit more than usual. This gives you
a way to wick excess solder away from the chip.

Other than that, Like others said, use a regular soldering iron. Put
too much solder on at first, then wick off the extra with copper braid.
Use lots of flux. It's pretty quick and easy to do. The only time this
doesn't work is if you have signals that are very high impedance, where
the excess flux might cause too much current to flow between pins. For
those cases, you really do need to use a stencil and reflow and get it
"just right" so that the reflow burns off all (ha!) of the flux.

Even with a paste stencil you're going to get shorts occasionally.
Learn how to quickly fix them ;-)

Also, for fine pitch parts, the solder mask usually doesn't fit between
the pins anyway due to fab spacing rules, so it's not going to help you.
Most of my fab'd boards have no mask between pins on QFPs et al.