Very true, practice is practice and better practice on something that doesnt cost much or is broken annyways. I always found it harder to desolder than to assemble a kit for example because it can be a pain to get components out if they have more than 2 pins if you dont have a good desolder sucker pump thingy.

A hot air station is nice but the biggest help with small electronics is magnification, your hands will be a lot steadier once you see better. I think the control loop in our brain can handle small movement a lot better once the feedback is bigger. Once i see the tip of the iron under the microscope i can solder miniature smd stuff without shaking at all.

Good tweezers are a must. And a iron with intigrated heaters in the tip like the cheap t12 stations from ebay works a lot better than the stations with tips and heater separated. A nice project is this:
https://github.com/wagiminator/ATmega-Soldering-Station

You can get t12 handles and tips for cheap on aliexpress.

Also the cheap hot air stations are fine but i would check the temps with a thermocouple when setting it up the first time they may not be calibrated correctly.

Get lead solder, if you wash your hands and dont eat the solder its fine, it will flow better and doesnt need the high temps of unleaded solder.

Flux also is really important, you can mix your own with rosin and ethanol for cheap but you can only clean it with ethanol so be aware that its very sticky. If you have questions please ask, its always nice if people learn to repair stuff :)

Yea you also should have the car your are charging from run while charging yours and while starting so the alternator can help out with the current that is needed and the other batterie does not deplete to much.

Hell if you have a diesel with no batterie and a gas car with an empty batterie you could still start both by first starting the diesel with a roll start and then charging your batterie from their alternator while its running.

Did you not get the joke?