There are videos on YouTube testing different mfgs of kapton tape. Some of the chinesium ones do fine as far as temps go.

But for general use where you are dealing with insane temps, pretty much any should be fine IMO.

For thermal pads, I look for what they are rated at per the seller and look at reviews. Amazon is pretty good for this.

Trace repair stickers sound like they would not really be reliable for anything that needs any sort of actual power going through the traces. Probably would need to see if anybody had done actual testing on those to see how they work and what the resistance is.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-05-06, 19:37:

Hi folks, […]
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Hi folks,

So has anyone been buying any supplies from cheapie online retailer sources, such as...
trace repair stickers,
thermal transfer pads,
plastic restorer (claims to de-yellow)
solder pastes,
knockoff kapton tape.
???

I tend to value cheap and quantity due to having large amount of hardware to go through, so not everything gets the full top dollar princess treatment, as long as it's not a total waste of time to use.

Trace repair stickers would seem to be timesavers, since often you could slap one of those down without disassembling everything for a solder session. Thermal transfer pads I know are "meh" compared to decent job with thermal paste, but there are things where many chips mount to heatspreader, or like in optical drives where a lot sink to case, where pads are more required. The plastic restorers I am seeing seem to come out cheaper than buying the raw materials for mixing up retrobrite...

I've bought some solder & kapton tape on aliex.
the kapton tape seems fine to me.
the solder on the other hand... the weight that they list includes the plastic which the solder is rolled up on and it's heavy. here's a video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRgpq4MNRYQ

ymmv.

edit: I've also tried some solderwick, and my experience with that wasn't that great, the wires that were used in the wick were too thick and due to that there weren't a lot of them to actually make a good wick, and the wick didn't have any flux like substance applied to it so to make it sorta usable flux needed to be applied separately.

edit: and a bigclivedotcom video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ91gktACXw

I've bought fake Kapton and wick on Ali,
Kapton i got both good stuff and what's essentially yellow-tinted packing tape that melts if you look at it funny. The listings seems the same for both so I don't know how to tell. The only thing I can say is that thin stuff was always proper whereas thicker tape (2cm+) had an higher chance of being fake.
As for wick was always good but I always bought Japan-made Gootwick. Was it genuine? I don't know but it works very well.
Flux (supposedly Amtech but they're not fooling anyone) was also alright for the price.

Solder I've never dared to buy, there's a shop in town that sells proper german made 60/40 (not cheap though) so i've never had the need.
I've had an idea of getting some low temp solder but the chance of it being some sort of mercury/cadmium death alloy scares me.