Share your repair work and diagnostic stories with the world.
>>109014565i held the wire of my headphones while my dad resoldered it
>>109014565I got a 65' tv of the side of the road, wanted to learn how to fix electronics some day so i stored it for a few monthstook it apart and took some photos so i could reference it later incase i ever got to trying to fix ittried turning it on a few months later and it just werked, i guess the power cable was pulled out of socket or something
I was clumsy with a screwdriver and accidentally broke a tiny SMD resistor off my nearly brand new 2TB NVMe SSD. The SSD stopped working. I got a tube of thermal grizzly liquid metal and put a glob of that over the place where the resistor broke off. The SSD started working again and has been working for the last 3 years.I don't store any important data on it now, only stuff that I can download again if the ssd breaks again. But kek at the absolute nigger tier fix that was and somehow it just werked.
>>109014565Bought a faulty Sony GDM-F520. Poked it with an oscilliscope until I figured out what was going wrong. A high resistance contact causing hideous voltage ripple on the video amplifier power rails, which quickly overwhelms capacitors on that rail destroying them, and then that ripple bleeds to the image, causing the fault.Jump the bad contact and replace the burned capacitors. Works like new.
>>109014565I repaired it with money.
I don't know what my proudest is but the only repair story that comes to mind is the Xbox HDDs.In high school I used to mod and repair Xboxes and if someone borked their disk you had to power on the console and hot swap the IDE cables at during a specific phrase while data was decrypted.I forget the details but I always hated doing it. I think they were paired with a key or some shit and write locked otherwise. idk
>>109014565My 5 year old nephew fixed a flickering display by replacing the bulging capacitorsit’s a pretty simple fix but I’m not sure i even knew how to read when I was 5
>>109014565One of the most tiresome troublesome repairs was replacing a keyboard in a laptop. It's held together with molten plastic rods, basically plastic rivets. You have to cut theip caps off one by one. And there are dozens of them.Now I understand why repair technicians are so pissed and nag about repair rights.
>>109014721Little genius will turn retarded real quick if you don't limit his exposure to lead fumes.
My repair story: >>108974412Unfinished but I'm proud of my diagnostic work so far.>>1090147215 year old? Now that's impressive. Being able to do board level repair at this young age...
>>109014565too lazy to get the pic but i opened up my gaming mouse and replaced the 2 button switches and the scroll wheel encoder thing. it was finnicky but it works. the parts cost close to nothing. the mouse is 8 years old so any extra usage i get out if it is a bonus.
>>109014746most solder these days is lead free
>>109014789Yea but it’s shit, nowhere near as tasty as the og
I also repaired my friend's 3DS once. It had a cracked screen and crackling speakers.>>109014789Most of the solder sold for repairs is leaded, though you shouldn't concern yourself with lead fumes that much. Your soldering iron melts lead, it doesn't evaporate it.Flux, on the other hand... yeah don't let kids inhale this stuff.
>>109014701Yeah, the X-box hard-disk was "locked." Mods allowed you to unlock them, but it runs into issues if you try to swap drives since the BIOS for the X-box wants to find the locked drive.Doesn't matter that much now a days since CeberOS for them will boot with an unlocked hard-drive.
>>109014823Leaded solder melts at lower temps, sure. But to do a repair that kid would have to deal with unleaded solder applied at the factory, which melts at much higher temps. Lead evaporates at around 482°C. Soldering iron you'd use to melt unleaded solder is capable of getting close to those temps.I never measured anything like that in the air, but I'm sure some fumes would be present. Besides, just touching lead is enough for it to start poisoning your body. Literally touching leaded solder is bad for kids.
>>109014646>liquid metal on tracesbro
Took out the battery from my car and replaced it with a new one
>>109014878>Soldering iron you'd use to melt unleaded solder is capable of getting close to those tempsholy retardit's 350-380 celcius for unleaded
I replaced headphone pads.
>>109014565It's nothing crazy but one time the garage door opener motor stopped working and I opened up and managed to find where a tiny solder point had just barely come loose on the PCB and resoldered it.Diagnosing and replacing the color wheel on a DLP HDTV was interesting too.
I get Skinemax for free with this sucker.
>>109014878I have yet to find solder i cant melt with my iron set at 380deg
>>109014565Sorry, they're all strictly classified.
>>109014565I got a steamdeck from a pawn shop for 120 bucks because it didnt hold a charge and the shell was scratched a little, so i ordered a new shell and battery it turns out the batery cable was disconnected, that's why it only worked plugged in, i did change the battery anyways because i got a biger one, and it was a nice surprise because turns out it someone already added TMR sticks on it, pretty lucky if you ask me and the first time i change a shell this complicated to change; my previous experience modding consoles was changing the shell of a gbc and a ds (which was a bitch to replace, but the steam deck definetely wins in terms of challenge)>>109014629>be me>friend offers a 55 tv because it doesn't work anymore>but you have to come pick it up bro>go there, take tv, say hi ti his mom and she says good luck fixing it >go back to my place>its working perfectly fine>hey friend the tv is fine you want it back?>nah i just wanted an excuse for my parents to buy me a bigger one, ggmust be nice being that rich i suppose
>>109014629Lots of consumer electronics failures are extremely simple to fix
>>109018674Not anymore. It rarely breaks, but when it does, it makes more sense to trash it. That's more like it these days.Unless we're talking about something like caps going bad over times or fuse replacement. Those are easy. Doing smd with no name chink shit is not easy at all, it's very confusing.
I'm debloating my old house removing drywall on drywall on plaster on lathe on board on stud... Its a good feel. I want to calculate the total sqft increase because 2-4 inches around the perimeter of a house adds up. Already feels roomier. Physical debloating so so much more satisfying
>>109018729I'm considering the opposite, adding drywall to my plaster on bricks wall.
A few years ago, I bought a Game Boy Color from eBay that didn't have working audio. I opened it up and found that a previous owner had tried to recap it, but ripped a pad off and gave up. I soldered a 30 gauge wire from a new capacitor to the trace and painted over it with conformal coating to seal it, then used a 33 gauge hypodermic needle to squirt a little glue under the capacitor on that side to keep it securely in place.Last week, I took it to the hospital I'm doing clinicals at and x-rayed it for fun. You can see the repair where I added a red arrow.
Soldiering larger ram into an iMac that didn’t have bay doors or removable ram. Required a complete take down of the screen and rebuild, which would be technical a level 3 board repair. >MFW I am but a humble code monkey who just likes to tinker
>>109018828Meant to write that it was a 23 gauge needle, not 33.
not really a repair but upgrading nintendo switch's ram from 4G to 8Gused the best sk hynix lpddr4 modules i can find that are compatible and now it can hit 5200MT/s (2600MHz) stable without the voltage increase
>>109014565Mine is porting libreboot on a zen based x370 board, now it liberated or fixed.
>>109014565I plugged the sky box into the tv with a HDMI cable. I also recently installed ubuntu on my moms shitty craptop and I've never used linux before but the laptop is working much better now.
>>109018992nice work. is there a huge benefit from doing this? these chips cost a lot and it's not like it can save switch's APU from being trash. it can't even emulate fzero gx
>>109019244not sure if it's worth doing or notyou need a modified payload.bin for hos to recognize it (or you can pop some of the fuse if you have a lucky bit pattern with the installed ram identifier field) and even after that most games have half-hardcoded memory usage so they won't utilize it anywaysi guess it is more useful on linux but hmm..ram overclock is good tho, helps with some of the intensive titles
>>109014565I fixed my IBM T40 many years ago by baking the motherboard in my oven for five minutes. It had a known issue with the video chip coming loose. Heating it up reflowed the solder. I still have that machine, just for sentimental purposes.
I don't really know what my proudest one is, I repair stuff for work, I have repaired stuff my whole life. I don't really have a moment that I feel proud of, they all mix together.I guess the time I soldered a mhf1 connector onto a pcb in Japan in a bar absolutely drunk using a usb-c soldering iron and it is still together despite pretty bad board damage from the old one ripping off.Hardest one? Hand assembling a laptop display cable, shielded eDP cable, like 36awg. I repinned the cable to use it on a board it wasn't meant to be used with.Most money saved? Shit for work I can't talk about but it was component replacement on a pcb, it saved an amount between 450,000 and 8,000,000usd.
I worked in electronics repair for a while, mostly phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. The other guys didn't like oddball jobs but they knew I loved them, so they started accepting all kinds of random shit they brought in. I once fixed a customers pre-lit Christmas wreath that had severe battery acid damage by cleaning it up and hacking the contacts back together. I have no idea what made it worth while for him. My bread and butter job back then was cracked iPhone 6 screens, and I got to the point where I could do nearly an OEM level repair WITH pre and post repair functions checks in 12 minutes. I've done countless iPads with screens and front glass that were just fucking obliterated and I had to dig shards out of everything. I've replaced the transmission on my jeep, rebuilt the air conditioning system on 2 other vehicles, fixed lots of my own electronics, etc. I know I've done some more impressive ones, especially when I was a broke teenager, but I can't remember them off the top of my head. My old 4:3 secondary computer monitor (it's a great ratio for secondaries) still has a hack job repair to expose the power button PCB because the plastic button broke off. I used receipt paper to diffuse the power LED so it looks so nice that I forget it's hacked together sometimes. I worked in a factory for a Chinese company here in the states and had to improvise repairs on the factory equipment many times, usually using scrap production materials to hold the machines them selves together. LOTS of absolutely fucked wiring in those things. These days I fix aircraft and it's way better, proper manual and equipment.
>>1090145657 years agopiece of shit overheating ADSL modem from tplink with no ventilation.took off the cover and used a stack of coins as a heat sink. applied cheap thermal paste between chip and coins and between each individual coinapplied piece of shit stock intel fan and had it connected to the DC feedkept top cover removedpiece of shit adsl tplink modem no longer overheats
>>109014565I replaced a few light switches around my houseAlso my Core 2 Duo Mac mini ran hot when I played TF2 on it and so it ate hard drivesI replaced the hard drive in it twice
>>109021156Who's your main?
>>109014670Cool, is this your pic?
macbook bezels and batteries, key switches and keycaps, display swaps...
>>109021231Yes
>>109021174Medic, then Pyro. My anti-main is Scout and my second-least-played class is sniper.
Once I had to disable a virus from inside an OS that no anti-virus even recognized at the time.Father got the virus on his laptop, probably due to porn sites or something. Shit lagged the hell out of his machine and made it virtually impossible to do much of anything. We had just moved, and the ISP was there to setup the internet, and my father's laptop was the only computer we had ready to go at the time. ISP monkey tries and fails due to the virus, and claims he can't get us online. I tell him to have a seat, then sit down and start trying to figure out how to get around the virus.Eventually I worked around the block on the command prompt opening by creating a script and running it as a .bat, which allowed me to disable the services the virus was using to fuck shit up, cleared out auto-run and restarted explorer, which finally allowed the ISP tech to get us online. 2006 tech support without an internet connection, yee haw.
I sell electronics on ebay so I've repaired so many random things from goodwill it all blends together. -few years ago I fixed a Razer laptop that was totally dead, bios chip was blank which they're apparently known for doing. ch341 programmer and a few minutes of fucking around with the spring clips got it up and running.-last year I fixed some kind of quack new age bs medical device, wouldn't turn on at all. Opened it up and the NiMH battery pack inside was totally dead and putting so much load on the power supply that it wouldn't even run off the adapter. quick search later and I found the exact same battery pack being sold for RC cars, bought one off Amazon for like 8 bucks, popped it in and sold the now working unit for $1200-fixed a Korg electronic organ that I got for $10 because none of the controls worked. All the tact switches just had some kind of oxidation in them. Was a bit hard finding the right size tall buttons with only 2 pins but after swapping them out it was good as new. Too huge to ship so I sold it to a local music shop for $450
>>109014565Probably the one where I had to disassemble my bigboy gorillaniggerphone after water damage, only using a hairdryer, card and knife.Close second was my mom's DSLR I "fixed" to capture the IR spectrum.All the other times were mostly laptop cpu repastes or screenswaps.
when i was in high school they had a bunch of shitty optiplexes that were dropping like flies, one of them even caught fire. There were some things donated to the school like a laptop with a sata drive (new for the time) that was completely fucked. I took the motherboard out, zip tied it to a pizza box, put it in the state mandated server rack (empty) and had 4 computers pxe booting lubuntu. knowing them, its probably still there.
>>109014565my brother found picrel at a dumpster and gave it to me for free since it didn't turn onopened it up, cleaned up rust, dirt and re-soldered the power wires, and turned on without a problemone openwrt flash later (since stock tp-link firmware fucking sucks) and this is now my backup router/wifi extender
>>109014565I've done repairs on any and everything my whole life but this one was one of the most memorable:>Christmas Day>little autistic nephew has an educational game tablet (LeapPad)>we'd gotten him some new games for it>jumping around Christmas morning>has a rubber case for it, but drops it HARD>no display>cry.jpg>spend the next 15 minutes opening it up>screen cable had popped out>reinsert screen cable>button the case back up>Uncle Saves Christmasfeelsgoodman
most involved was probably reswitching a few keyboards after bad spills? super involved and took tens of hours per board because i dont have a decent solder sucker. for one of them i even disassembled all the switches, washed them, lubed them, then reassembled them because i couldnt get new ones. jankest was probably a steam well at work where i "soldered" some mains wires for a heater back together after they had a dead short, but they had some kind of fire retardant coating on the copper so it was as close to crimping as you could get with solder because i didnt have crimps.>>109024588im a bit surprised they werent zebra strips. all the cheap shit uses them, and the number of lcds ive had to reseat on them is probably in the dozens now. fuck zebra strips. they shouldnt be allowed to be cheaper than rubbon cables but the connector cost is cents more than bare pads.
>>109024651>zebra stripthanks, til how those pieces of shit are called.I had a set of electronic calipers that stopped working after dropping them, they drained the battery pretty much instantly.Zebra strip must have got discolated and shorted the battery. It was held in place by pressure alone and i just couldn't place it right and gave up.What a stupid fucking way to connect PCBs.
>>109024705>I had a set of electronic calipers that stopped working after dropping them, they drained the battery pretty much instantly.>Zebra strip must have got discolated and shorted the battery. It was held in place by pressure alone and i just couldn't place it right and gave up.thats exactly how they fail, exactly how they function, and usually how repairs go for them. if youre especially blessed, whatever mechanical pcb fastener that sandwiches it in breaks during the drop, and there is no way to put it back in, which means your 10 minute "ill take it apart and fit it back together" repair turns into a 24 hour "ill come back tomorrow with my soldering station and some magnet wire and my magnifiers and give it a try" 50/50 gamble.
>>109014565macbook keyboard swapas a x200 and t440p owner - may apple designers be cursed lots of screws, different kinds of screws, riveted to aluminium chassiand also snipped and filed down case a bit, to change from ISO to ANSI layout
>>109024892>change from ISO to ANSI layouthow did macos handle this? id want to think itd just be a user-facing setting change, but considering how anal apple is with their hardware, i could see the keyboard being swwwapped out bricking the thing.
>>109014739It's best to just replace the entire palmrest.
>>109024651nope, just a regular-ass ribbon cable like you'd see in a 3ds or something from the era, but without a locking tab on the connector, so it partially got dislodged in the fall.
>>109014739It's best to just replace the palmrest.
>>109020775I have to know, why were you soldering drunk in a Japanese bar somewhere?
>>109020775I have to know, why were you soldering while drunk in a Japanese bar?
>>109024913in ISO "~" was near left shift, so I had moved keycaps and remapped layoutso after swapping to new keyboard the OS itself recognized new layout without problem, I just had to delete all my remappings since they were no longer needed as for touch ID - it's connected with ribbon cable, so original one stayed and kept working just fine
>>109014565>have some POS wireless logiturd keyboard>always had problems with the thing disconnecting at random and resetting itself, even when brand new>first wireless keyboard, too so just assumed all wireless keyboards did this shit if there was something nearby emitting interfering RF signals (WiFi, bluetooth, cell phones, microwaves, Flowers By Irene van parked out in front)>had enough one day and decided to open the thing up>noticed the negative battery terminal is barely touching the wire "soldered" to it>break out the soldering iron, add more solder and reflow the connection to that terminal, then reassemble the keyboard>thing works perfectly, better than brand new now
>>109025137>Flowers By Irene van parked out in frontkek. It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.
>>109024892Am I the only person in the world that prefers ISO to ANSI?
>>109015196Hell yea!
>>109018828Good work anon. Youve now bricked your device with xrays.
>>109014565The only soldering repairs I've done that still work was when I was drunk and annoyed that I didn't fix it for some reason.
>>109024999Because the shit broke and I sourced a new antenna connector that afternoon but didn't have time to put it on before going out drinking. It was when I was already drunk I decided to do it at a bar
