I'm not familiar with the project that inspired this one, but you should pay attention to hot spots, heat should be equally spread across the whole plate. plus you should have good sensors and provide controllable configuration of heat points for soldering different components according to the manufacturer's datasheet.

I'm yet to venture into the world of expensive but quality solder and flux. I'm still using materials from Aliexpress. When i get into the more quality of boards i will bring in the extra cost of those high quality products. Thanks for your feedback guys!

@soward I use some sort of no-name 10 uH 12mm (I know, stupidly big) shielded inductor from AliExpress. Looks a lot like these, fairly bulky and heavy: http://m2.uxcell.com/photo_new/20140506/c/ux_a14050600ux0992_ux_c.jpg Haven't done more than go over it with the continuity tester to see that it didn't have some sort of rudimentary inside damage. I also tested the capacitors, they were close enough to 10 uF but I did some surprising minor variation that can't be blamed on the DMM. Random Ebay caps are probably not a good idea if you need spot on values. But they did seem to work.