I do my own. I bought a digitally temp controlled solder station and a Hakko 808. If you have any amount of work to do or plan on messing around with pins for a while the stuff will more than pay for itself.

I bought this station.
http://www.ntscope.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=MTC&Product_Code=AT201D
It is the same one that Radio Shack sells but you are buying it direct from the manufacturer. Plus you can buy different tips and replacement tips from Madell. RS doesn't stock them.

BTW, you don't want a soldering gun for board work. They are fine for soldering in coils and stand up targets but not much else on pins.

Edit: It is the Hakko 808. I incorrectly called it the 880 previously.

If you're not comfortable doing the soldering your self and you have someone else who can do it, invest in the beer

Soldering components on is easy enough (although, it can be messed up), but removing the old components is the tricky part. If you don't know what your doing, you can damage the board pretty easily.

I do all my own repairs as well as a lot of other Electronics work. I'm sure a lot of others on here do as well. You can too, with a little practice, just take your time and you might practice on something you arent afraid to damage first.

I bought a Digital Solder station of my own from Newark Electronics, but you can get an inexpensive unit from Radio Shack.

G

I just shipped a member back his DMD display(s) today. He had blown a surface mount IC on it and it was one of the "finer" pinned ones. We have specialized equipment at work for super fine surface mount work. Hopefully that was the only problem.

Working with DIP IC's and discreet components is pretty easy and you should give it a try. When it gets to the really super small surface mounted stuff you might want to seek assistance. Pick up some junk boards of any kind and practice on them.

Soldering new components onto the board is the easy part. It's getting the old ones off that can make the difference between repaired and recycled. The more pins on a chip, the tougher things get. Lots of ways to do it, but you're better off practicing before doing it on an important board.

The one part that I recommend you don't try until you're experienced is the switch matrix PIA on Williams 3-7 boards. That area gets such a bad heat soaking that it can be very easy to lift up the traces and mangle the whole area.

-Hans

I do my own repair work for the most part. There are certain areas of the MPU boards I don't mess with.

I can manage with through hole components. Surface mount on the other hand...