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- Apr 28, 2006
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Anyone do a lot of solder work? I've generally not been the greatest at this, but one sister-in-law had brought a number of poorly treated electronic devices that needed some work. I've soldered a 3.5mm jack onto something that was torn off before, so she had hoped I could fix them. They've been sitting around for a couple months, but she'll be visiting again in a few weeks so I started looking at the pile of work last night.
Had a laptop charger, big brick that plugs into the wall with a cord that goes to the PC, the wall prongs were on a plate that had come off and wires to it had ripped off. Managed to solder the wires back on and got the casing apart, cleaned up and glued together.
Next up was an Xbox 360 that had fallen when cleaning. Some of the plastic pieces had come apart, but I pulled it all apart with my iFixit toolkit and got down to the guts just to check things out. Found a bent piece on the WiFi circuit board that had bent and disconnected at a solder point. I was not looking forward to soldering on a circuit board, but gave it a shot and it wasn't super pretty, but seemed to work. Put everything back together (after gluing one other spot), powered it up and at least the xbox turned on. Next up went to networking and hooray it saw WiFi, could connect to it and was able to download an update.
The last project will be a pretty simple one, just another 3.5mm end to put on a speaker where the factory one was ripped off. I am looking into a decent solder station with variable temps and better tips for the iron though, as it would've made these simple projects simpler yet and I have some other projects planned where a good setup would be nice to have.
Had a laptop charger, big brick that plugs into the wall with a cord that goes to the PC, the wall prongs were on a plate that had come off and wires to it had ripped off. Managed to solder the wires back on and got the casing apart, cleaned up and glued together.
Next up was an Xbox 360 that had fallen when cleaning. Some of the plastic pieces had come apart, but I pulled it all apart with my iFixit toolkit and got down to the guts just to check things out. Found a bent piece on the WiFi circuit board that had bent and disconnected at a solder point. I was not looking forward to soldering on a circuit board, but gave it a shot and it wasn't super pretty, but seemed to work. Put everything back together (after gluing one other spot), powered it up and at least the xbox turned on. Next up went to networking and hooray it saw WiFi, could connect to it and was able to download an update.
The last project will be a pretty simple one, just another 3.5mm end to put on a speaker where the factory one was ripped off. I am looking into a decent solder station with variable temps and better tips for the iron though, as it would've made these simple projects simpler yet and I have some other projects planned where a good setup would be nice to have.