QUESTION
I've noticed that when soldering small PCBs can get very hot. Since I haven't yet been able to find a good vise in which to hold PCBs, I mostly hold them in my hand and after several minutes of soldering, they tend to get uncomfortably hot.
I haven't seen many information on Internet about this, so I'm asking for tips here.
ANSWER
Shouldn't need to cool them while hand soldering. In fact, cooling them whilst soldering would induce a lot of thermal stress with cool areas of the PCB and really hot areas in other bits of the PCB.
You may be overheating the PCB with incorrect soldering technique or maybe your PCB has big ground polygons/planes and you're soldering on joints connecting to these ground polygons/planes without a thermal relief.
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