Needed a pesky QFN-16 part reflow-soldered onto my latest wacky creation at work, and we don't have our own reflow oven, so I took it over to the main fab shop. The fab shop does contract electronics fabrication for anyone at the lab, but their primary customers are the folks who build spacecraft. So everything sitting on the benches was wild mil-spec, rad-hardened, gold-capped flight hardware. It was pretty cool.

I felt like a bit of a doofus talking to their head fabricator and putting in my work order for a single 16-pin chip to be reflowed on...