These SMD prototyping shields from Elecfreaks are pretty useful for building and testing discrete circuits made with mostly 2 and 3-terminal surface mount devices. I’ve used them quite a bit over the past year to prototype power supply and switching circuits (mostly SOT-23s). I like to cut them into small pieces with a large metal shear and stick them to larger PCBs (the ones I’m testing/modifying) with thick double-stick foam tape.
Dealextreme is home to a few good buys on electronics prototyping supplies.
Here are a few of my favorites.
These miniature thrum scissors are handy for opening ESD bags, trimming the ends off of SMD component reels, and cutting kapton tape, among other things. I keep several pairs at work and at home and use them all the time. They are much more precise than standard scissors and good for all sorts of light duty applications. (You can also buy these from amazon.com here: Blue Handle Stitching Yarn Thrum Scissor Tool 3 Pcs
These Lodestar L601110 ESD tweezers are perfect for all sorts of electronics prototyping and repair work. I find them very useful for surface mount assembly and rework, but I also use them for precision gluing, discharging SMD caps, shorting traces on PCBs, and also sorts of other off-label uses. They are cheap enough that when I bend or otherwise damage one set, I’ll throw them away and buy another. If I only owned one pair of tweezers, it would be these.
These configurable storage boxes seem to be slightly lower quality than the ones offered by Adafruit but are a tad bit cheaper and a nice add-on item if you’re already placing an order at DX.
This 45-in-1 multi bit screwdriver set is decent for the price and generally useful for disassembling a wide range of consumer electronics devices.
Update 1/2/2015:
Chris Jones (@chrisgj198) pointed out a few items I missed!
