So now I’m wondering if maybe I should give soldering a light a try?
Today I took a shot at soldering a new DC power receptacle to replace the broken one on the motherboard of a very nice 1 year old Asus laptop. The receptacle had 4 ground prongs where the solder could touch the body and 1 positive pin where the solder could NOT touch the body or it would short. Doing that part right seemed like a miracle (The old positive pin had broken from the plug twisting on it.)
I also had to replace the plug since the positive wire was also ripped off that as well. Radio Shack plug had to be opened up a bit with the dremel to fit the wire casing. Soldered the positive, wrapped with a small bit of electrical tape and then soldered the negative. Shrink-wrapped the wire to the back of the plug to help keep the wire from being pulled from the contacts inside the plug body.
Used a basic pencil soldering iron that I got from my father-in-law after he died. My Weller gun is ~35 years old and this thing is probably 50+ years old. The tip is at least 3/16” with maybe 2 mm of taper to a blunt “tip”. Still beats using the gun.
After all the soldering I put the motherboard back in the case and completely reassembled the laptop. Plugged in the power and hit the Power button. Sweet Success!
Probably won’t start with a 4 color MCE in and SK68, but this was a nice project to build a little experience that I’ve never had.
BTW, NEVER solder electronics with a soldering gun. They can induce a very powerful current/voltage spike in what is being soldered (particularly when you switch the gun on and off). It can easily fry delicate electronics.
Keep it up! When I first started, I had a 250 watt soldering gun… it didn’t work well at all! I quickly learned the importance of flux and a good clean tip.
I can tell you messing with the teen grandson’s laptop was a lot more nerve-wracking than trying to repair or improve one of my lights will ever be. Best Buy told him it would be a few hundred for them to replace the whole motherboard and since it was a present he wasn’t looking forward to waiting till Christmas for another one.
Haven’t used flux with soldering, have with copper pipe fittings and never really got that right.
Perhaps I cheated when I used some old rosin core solder with real lead. Guess that messes with the recycling rating but for the 5 little drops . . whatever, seems like less of an issue than putting a whole motherboard into recycling without need.