Mr. RB:
I'm not talking about hand soldering. I'm talking about reflowing everything but the through hole devices, and then just running the iron to them. There will only be 7 or 8 of them anyway.
I picture it running like this:
Laying all the components out in individual boxes with everything labeled. I'll take the PCBs and run paste over a stencil that I'll have made. With practice, I believe that I could stencil a small board in a about 2 minutes, place components in about 5 minutes, and then lay it on the hot plate and start the process over for the next board as that one started to heat. I've seen pictures on spark fun electronics where they have made some very professional looking boards with this method.
When all of this is done, I can test each board. Perhaps I'm ignorant, but I'd think that this entire process wouldn't take more than 15 minutes per board once I got it going.
I think testing would be as easy as hooking it up to a computer through UART, having an ISR programmed for an interrupt on change, and then just bridging one of the INT pins that will be tied to ground with a resistor to Vcc to enter the ISR. The ISR could take a series of readings from the enternal components, and I could have something programed on the computer side that checks the received UART message for reasonability. From there, I think it's just a matter of close visual inspection and leaving it on for a while to make sure it doesn't get too hot. The actual hands on time per board for testing would be maybe 5 minutes.
Am I too optomistic here?