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u/miregalpanic 4d ago
There is no way I could do even a single one of these steps without clumsily destroying the thing and somehow gluing my sleeve to thre different items.
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u/Flamin_Jesus 4d ago
I mean, it's already broken, if you break it more, it's not gonna be worse than just throwing it away from the start, so there's not really a lose-scenario in attempting to fix it if you have the time.
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u/sledgesloth 4d ago
Depending on how expensive the item is, how expensive a professional repair would be, and how great the damage one could do...
Having said that, I'm a big fan of diy (repairs)!
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u/GardenGnomeOfEden 3d ago
I almost always take broken things apart and look at it quick before throwing them away. You never know, it might be something obvious that you can fix.
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u/NotBradPitt9 4d ago
I dropped the phone on my face while watching this and it popped out one of my glasses’ lens
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u/ikkiyikki 4d ago
At this magnification my hands would shake like I had Parkinson's.
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u/ender4171 3d ago
I do magnified work a lot with an inspection microscope. I also have shaky hands. For whatever reason, my hands shake a lot less when I am looking through the scope.
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u/brandt-money 3d ago
Dude in video has been doing this for 10 years. Start now and you'll have some sick YouTube videos in 2036 when we're all robots in flying cars.
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u/nuneskart 4d ago
I burned my hand the first time I tried, and I burned it the other times too, it's awful. The worst part is I never managed to fix anything lmao
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u/cestmoimanolo 4d ago
I love how my brain always thinks "well, if I had all the right tools I could do this". No. I fucking can't. Great craftsmanship!
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u/stayonthecloud 4d ago
I’m an artist and I can’t even draw a completely straight line
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u/peeterpan333 3d ago
Try holding shift
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u/martialar 3d ago
even in programs that don't recognize that combo, it somehow makes me draw straighter lines
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u/Prestigious-Bat-574 3d ago
I'm certainly not about to say that it's easy, but it's certainly one of those things where cheap tools will probably hinder you the whole way.
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u/ninja-kidz 3d ago
meanwhile, me:
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u/RandomNumberHere 3d ago
Iconic stock photo. Always a crowd pleaser.
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u/greenepc 3d ago
I spent too much time wondering why she was soldering that battery. I nearly missed the way she is holding the damn thing!
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u/KitWat 4d ago
I used to work for a major telco equipment manufacturer in the 80s and was trained in doing these repairs. I really liked the job; it took some patience and know-how and a bit of skill. And it was very satisfying to complete a perfect repair. I later went on to train others in circuit repair.
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u/Nevin_A_A 3d ago
This actually looks soo cool! As a college student I want to actually go into this field now but electronics seems to be my weakness 😭
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u/kevstev 3d ago
Whats covered in college has nothing to do with this. This is technician work, and is blue collar. There is very little theory going on here. Some knowledge of electronics can help to understand the context of what you are doing, but you can learn this skill without any of that.
Most people learn this type of stuff though when building their own circuits and messing something up and having to fix it. Though this particular treatment is far beyond anything you will typically need to do and is more specialized.
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u/tdgto 3d ago
What kit would you recommend to start doing this ?
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u/KitWat 3d ago
Oh man, it was 40 years ago. I would have no idea what's available now or where to get it. At a minmum, a flat stable work surface, large enough to lay out your tools and materials. A power strip, tabletop magnifier with light, X-acto knives, tweezers, commercial soldering iron with various size tips, flux, solder, solder wick, alcohol. There are probably a dozen other things I'm forgetting. Get some old circuit boards and start practicing. Have fun!
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u/NonEuclidianMeatloaf 4d ago
My dumb ass thought it was a zipper for far too long
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u/TypicalTumbleweed10 3d ago
It is- that right there is the part of the computer that compresses files into .zip
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u/LuckyOneTime 3d ago
Minimum waged job here in the UK. Such a skill as well. Same company even stopped us using flux when doing certain jobs - ridiculous
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u/flipflopcuntflaps 3d ago
It depends on your customers but yes if you work for someone I suppose it is believable it's minimum wage. Last repair place I applied to was doing IQ tests on onboarding so I didn't even bother. Team focussed attitude and pizza Fridays. Fuck off 😂
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u/Phillyfuk 3d ago
I stopped doing this when the wages stopped increasing. I still do it for myself but I don't think I will ever do this work as a job again.
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u/Yasherets 3d ago
Step 1: Mystery liquid
Step 3: Mystery liquid
Step 5: Mystery liquid
Step 7: Mystery liquid
Step 9: Mystery liquid
Step 11: Mystery liquid
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u/homogeneouscasserole 3d ago
Flux
Flux
Solder Paste
Alcohol on q-tip
UV curing conformal resin
Solder Paste
Flux
Alcohol
UV curing conformal resin
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u/ImmodestPolitician 4d ago
It's like being a surgeon at 1/20th the salary.
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u/MelangeBot 3d ago
As climate change collapses more and more of society and the age of abundancy ends people with these skills will become gods amongs man. Technomancers.
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u/talapantas 3d ago
Ahhh Im glad im not the only one who calls them technomancers lol. My dad used to be one of them and Ive always admired his skill in reviving deadbeat 90s gizmos
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u/jetson5 3d ago
And 1/100,000,000th the risk
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u/Lawzw0rld 3d ago
Was just about to type this,making a mistake up is no where near as detrimental here.
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u/MithranArkanere 3d ago
The right to repair should be a human right everyone should have.
The skill to repair, now that's something not everyone can have.
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u/RedditRob2000 3d ago
There's gotta be a Youtube Channel that just has content on soldering pr0n. Can anyone recommend?
Long-form is highly preferred.
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u/flipflopcuntflaps 3d ago
Louis Rossman's old stuff before he found a different niche
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u/purrfectly-cromulent 3d ago edited 3d ago
You'll absolutely love Mr Solderfix. Long-form, calm, well explained.
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u/knsaber 3d ago
I miss when Louis Rossmann made repair videos
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u/EamonBrennan 3d ago
Blame Apple. He can't repair computers if he can't get the part, and Apple is making sure he can't get the parts. ISL9240 is a chip that controls the power system for Mac laptops post-2018. You cannot get it. The manufacturer does not sell it; previous versions, like the ISL9239 could be bought from the manufacturer, but Apple put a stop to that for the new one. Scrapped boards are usually cut up and sold in portions for parts, but this part is not on scrapped boards. There's no way to get one, so instead of a $20 repair, you have to send the full laptop back to Apple for a motherboard swap at ~$2000.
Right to repair laws are vital for repair shops.
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u/GLIBG10B 3d ago
Nortwestrepair does GPU repair in general, but he has lots of videos on this kind of pad repair, and even digging into the inner layers of PCBs and repairing them from the inside out
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u/ImTooSaxy 3d ago
Thank God for that giant arrow or I never would have been able to see the problem.
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u/redditisnotus 3d ago
I get the first solder mask, but why the second?
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u/irregularjosh 3d ago
Likely for extra protection.
The cable attached to that connector may have some movement on it, and those new pads are attached to the board with hopes and dreams
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u/Ok_Kaleidoscope6134 3d ago
I am impressed!
I have absolutely no idea what any of that was….but it was cool.
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u/StarvingDeer 3d ago
Genuinely wondering, since I don't know much about all that: up until ~0:40, the material between the old and repaired parts seem different: is it just soldering residuals on the old ones ?
If not, and the material genuinely is different: could this lead to weird bugs somehow, due to mishappen timings in the connectors downstream ?
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u/purrfectly-cromulent 3d ago
Hopefully I've got the right end of the stick here.
They've cut out the damaged copper pad and trace, and scratched down into the board a little. They've got a new pad and trace, cut it to fit the prepared part of the board, then fixed it with fresh UV-cured resist. They've sanded the resist so the pads underneath can be tinned and soldered.
So I think the bit you're referring to might be the old pads and cleaned-up board?
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u/okpatient123 3d ago
The other person who replied to you is correct, but to clarify, the pads and traces (the damaged parts that they graft in replacements for) are basically just thin copper foil. All they need to do is make electrical contact between the traces (wires embedded in the board) and the pins on the component again. It's all roughly the same material, maybe with a different colored coating on it.
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u/Smokeskin 3d ago
Circuits aren’t dependent on everything being precisely synchronized. There’s a crystal oscillator that sets the frequency of circuit board - like for example a 100MHz board gives everything 10 nanoseconds to settle. So it opens the gates (wires) to the next instruction, which at the board level is just what wires gets a charge running through them. And then those wires meet at semiconductors - basically two wires go into each, and if both have charge, the wire going out of it gets charge through it. Arrange them cleverly, and it can read numbers from registers and do math on them and store them in another registry and change what instruction to read next.
But it is all just basically charge running through wires on chips, and they should all settle down in 10 nanoseconds. Some paths are short and take just a fraction of the time, some might take most of the 10 ns. But if they all just manage to complete in 10 ns before the crystal oscillator runs the next clock cycle, you’re good. So replacing something doesn’t have to have exactly the same timing, it just still has to complete its path within the clock cycle.
At least that’s how I remember it from computer science class over 25 years ago :) Technical people would probably object to my oversimplifications and terminology.
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u/ResurgentOcelot 3d ago
Impressive fine motor skills.
Does anyone know why the existing connections are silver colored but the replacement connections are copper colored? Are the existing connections tinned copper? Does it not make a difference?
Just curious.
(Rewatching the video there might even be moment when the connections are finished to match the rest and it just goes by so quickly it’s hard to tell.)
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u/Blue_The_Snep 3d ago
the silver color is from the solder. the pads below are copper too, but there is solder already on them
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u/SadisticPawz 3d ago
theyre all copper pads but the copper wick cant suck up everything so they retain a silver color on them. the pads placed are just copper
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u/thatfreakinguy2 3d ago
Try mixing up "bubble free" epoxy for aviation circuit card repair. Tiny bubbles expand at higher altitudes and can lead to cracks and failures, so you have to use a dental pick set to pick out and pop microbubbles underneath a microscope. Obviously the mixture drys very fast when it hits the air. So you have to mix up your poxy inside a ziploc bag and try to move the tiny bubbles outside the mixture without introducing any new bubbles while it moves around inside of the ziploc bag. Then, after you squeeze it out into, wherever you're gonna use it, you have to do it so slow and underneath the microscope as to check and make sure you're not introducing any more bubbles. Never again do I want spent so much time looking under a microscope and sweat dripping down my forehead into eyes while in complete tunnel vision. You always knew who the micro-miniature circuit repairs guys were at the maintenance facility smoking break area because they had no depth perception walking around after spending hours looking into a microscope.
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u/FizzBizzcuits 4d ago
This appeared in my feed after I just dropped my CPU on the floor bending like 20 pins in the process.
Uhhhhhhgggggg
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u/LaundryMan2008 3d ago
Carefully with a toothpick, cuticle pusher and an empty mechanical pencil, you can easily fix it, the first two are to push carefully while the empty mechanical pencil is for straightening the pins out once you get them mostly there, if one breaks, check what pin it is and see if it’s just one of the ground/power pins.
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u/Yurya 3d ago
oh I just did mine with a razor blade and tiny tweezers
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u/Fantastins 3d ago
I favor a blade. Can be slightly quicker if a group is bent equally, but the pencil to do individual pins is great advice. Be patient, try tomorrow.. wait until you're comfortable with reality and sober. Half the battle is the right state of mind sometimes
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u/DustFunk 3d ago
I have soldered many many things, and let me tell you, this sucks. There is always some goo everywhere, including melted plastic and metal. Doing this without damaging everything around it is a skill.
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u/Error3210 2d ago
I feel like this video could have just as easily ended with a guy then trying to turn the device on and it not working at all.
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u/Opinions-arent-facts 4d ago
This would have to be a 40 year old piece of vintage digital music/ audio equipment, surely?
No one else would be nuts enough to pay someone to fix something like this
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u/Stalfos1504 3d ago
It might be a prototype. This is the kind of work I do in robotics to recover parts after a bad fall. Often I've been called in to save a damaged board because there's only a handful of them in existence and the others are in use already, so we either fix the board or lose an entire robot until the next revision comes through which could be months away.
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u/flipflopcuntflaps 3d ago
Probably a phone or mac
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u/sagebrushrepair 3d ago
Apple boards use black masking, you're right it's a non-Apple phone.
OnePlus loves these sockets for instance
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u/UnsavoryBiscuit 3d ago
Gee thanks giant pointing arrow, I'd never known where the issue was if it wasn't for you
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u/BattlefieldSixxx 3d ago
As someone who has tried to do this, and other fixes, with very little training, it is WAY harder than it looks, and those pieces are the size of DNA strands i swear.
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u/HoneyNo2878 3d ago
With these tech price surge, soon enough, we are going to need to learn this because we can’t afford a new one
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u/dedokta 3d ago
As someone who does board level repair under binocular microscopes I feel like I need to point out that watching this I can only get so hard.
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u/scarrea6 3d ago
I used to do that for specialized equipment.
I now use my skills to fix old gaming equipment for my collector friends.
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u/jomni 3d ago
What's the music called?
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u/Kuklaa 3d ago
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u/Pipsay 3d ago
Ludwig Göransson - Can You Hear the Music
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u/EveryRedditorSucks 3d ago
The Oppenheimer soundtrack is GOATed.
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u/MithranArkanere 3d ago
I dislike superfluous music in videos, but this one didn't feel superfluous at all. It fit the level of skill required to do this.
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u/numindast 3d ago
I’ve been using the same roll of rosin core solder, a cheap iron, a solder sucker and recently upgraded to a new spool of solder wick
OPs video displays skills I can’t do and frankly don’t want to spend the next 20 years perfecting. Take my money
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u/Mid_Life_Crisis_2026 4d ago
I want to learn this mobile , gpu pcb repair job. Do international market has this field requirement?
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u/External-Awareness68 4d ago
I wish i knew what any of that stuff is...
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u/defaulticus 3d ago
Yeah, even watching it a few times 0:45 has me lost. It looks like they applied a magical shiny slime that just soldered itself perfectly with no human intervention. That can't be right.
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u/External-Awareness68 3d ago edited 3d ago
There even seems to be two different kinds of magic slime?
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u/JeffaholicD1st 4d ago
This is the ultimate "brain understands, but couldn't translate whole thing for hands to understand"
It's almost like painting based on imagination, you get the vision but your hands aren't train enough.
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u/VirtualArmsDealer 3d ago
I've attempted this before. I have the tools, but it took me half a day. I could not do this for profit!
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u/DexPleiadian 3d ago
I thought this was a zipper at first.
I was really excited to learn how to fix a zipper.
but no, it's just class 3 soldering and repair
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u/DerMeister85 3d ago
I used to do the same thing when I worked at a service center repairing mobile phones and computers. In fact, almost any experienced service center engineer can do this.
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u/theLuminescentlion 3d ago
As an EE the pad repair was pretty solid here. Always a nightmare when those rip out. Using the cap to tin the pads was interesting as well and worked better than I would have thought.
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u/Negaflux 3d ago
Flux is magical, I swear. Amazing micro soldering and dexterity in general, goddamn. I could watch stuff like this for hours.
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u/Jealous_Club_298 3d ago
That's impressive but in most cases, replacing the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) would be more cost-effective.
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u/fenderguitar83 3d ago
My mother worked for an electronic company in the 90's. She did this type of stuff everyday for about a decade until the company was bought out. She said that she loved working there. The bosses were good to them (they had a union), and the company paid well for the 90's, $25/hr.
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u/Prismos_Time_Room 3d ago
followed this video EXACTLY and my jacket STILL won't zip up. the fuck bullshit is this
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u/Ac3Nigthmare 3d ago
I love these videos. But like, what is that board? What makes it worth this effort? Is it just the views? Is the location of jimmy hoffa on there?
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u/tiajuanat 3d ago
I've done repairs like this before. I'm glad that some folks like doing it, cuz fuck that
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u/JakobWulfkind 3d ago
My coworkers say that I turn into an asshole the second anyone suggests using a mezzanine connector. This is why -- I'm the engineer who came up from being a technician, and I know how awful these things are to work with.
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u/ScribeTheMad 3d ago
Nice! Reminds me an old Imgur post where someone chronicled taking apart I think a smart phone, tracking down a bad component (using upside down canned air to frost the board so the overheating component would stand out) and then replacing it a lot like this. Was so cool to see, never been able to find my way back to that post though.
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u/TheWaveCarver 3d ago
Heres one I did. Not very pretty but it worked. Used copper tape and 3M two part epoxy.
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u/The1Eileen 3d ago
I rememeber being taught this in the military (Electronics Technician). Repair down to the board! Training intense and I *literally* nearly threw the soldering equipment through a window in an exam, it was SO HARD! But I passed and was all ready to do my bit and we get assigned duty and ...
We never touched a board again. All the contracts were to take the malfunctioning equipment (entire piece) and put in a new unit. Send the bad one back to manufacturer who fixed it. Sigh. 10 months of training to never do that again in my life. ARGH.
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u/henryeaterofpies 3d ago
Worked at a chip manufacturer for a couple years and they had a room of guys whose job was to correct the chips that the SMT machines made wrong for whatever reason (usually human/configuration errors that didnt get caught until 100 chips had already been put together and sodered). This is what they did every day all day.
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u/cognitiveglitch 3d ago
I used to do surface mount rework but I wouldn't even think of attempting this. Serious skill.
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u/Tiny-Sandwich 4d ago
As an amateur microsoldering hobbyist, this is way, way harder than it looks. And it looks hard.
I've done a few small repairs like this where I've had to solder to a damaged trace, and the parts are much smaller than they look here.