Surface-mount soldering trouble: what am I doing wrong?

[T4P]

The holes in the fan were probably ground-off mounting lugs that otherwise wouldn't fit. And as the video shows, they're not really detrimental to performance since hot air still comes out the tip like it's supposed to. Could it have been designed better? Probably. Does it matter in actual use? Probably not.

Exactly. But i've only seen this in atten ...

[baljemmett]

The holes in the fan were probably ground-off mounting lugs that otherwise wouldn't fit. And as the video shows, they're not really detrimental to performance since hot air still comes out the tip like it's supposed to. Could it have been designed better? Probably. Does it matter in actual use? Probably not.

I bought one recently (I needed to do one job which was probably going to be unsuccessful, so I wasn't going to spend real money on it!) -- took the machine apart just to check it out, after some of the comments here about build quality, earthing etc..  Looks like I got a good one -- no ground-off bits on the fan cage, power switch and grounding connected properly.  Dunno whether quality's improved overall or if it's just luck of the draw, but anyway.  A data point.