We get a lot of boxes here at Llamma that
have seen better days and require our services. Here's a few of the best
of the worst. This is meant to be humorous and educational at the
same time.
Epcot Solder
In this photo you will find one of
the most common mistakes made while installing a pin header. You
want to deliver the heat to the pin AND the ring at the same time and
flow the solder around and into the joint. The problem here was
that the heat was only applied to the pin resulting in no connection
being made to the actual LPC ring no matter how much solder is used.
This example is simply amazing!
That's HOT!
As Paris Hilton would say.. "That's
Hot". I am not sure how this happened but I do know one thing..
there is never a reason for this much heat during ANY install. The
Xbox is a reasonably resilient piece of hardware but it has its limits.
If your using a mini butane torch iron, plumbers iron, soldering gun,
spot welder or a oxyacetylene torch for soldering.. give up modding
altogether.
Alrighty Then
In this photo there is a lot wrong. I
believe the primary reason this did not go well and turned into a
disaster was that there was not enough heat. As you can see there
are three pins all connected by solder which is very hard to do with
solder that is in a proper liquid state. The only way I can
duplicate something like this is to turn my iron down far enough that
the solder starts to melt a bit but is still mostly gel like.
Solder Stalagmites
Controlling your solder is very
important when doing installations and repairs on complicated circuits
like a Xbox motherboard. I've seen many boards that were fragging
due to solder splashes; often times shorting multiple pins of
chips and small components. In this photo you can see solder in
many places it shouldn't be including stuck to the insulator of a wire
which is very difficult to do.
D0 - 3
Again.. Controlling your solder
is very important. When dealing with very small points make sure
that you are only making connection to the point you are supposed to be
soldering to. Shorting more than one is a sure way to get a frag
or a bad board. In this case the installer connected three
pads...funny enough D0 didn't even have continuity.
Wow, How?
One more
example of poor solder control and its a doosie. I have to imagine
this started out as a solder splash and got much worse.. Hopefully
it wasn't a 128MB upgrade attempt. Either way be careful about
where your apply or splash solder or you will end up with a mess and a
non working Xbox.
Moab Arch
This one is very creative.
After using to much heat and destroying the pads on the rebuild PCB the
user made miraculous recovery by building a solder arch from one point
to the other.. very amazing. Unfortunately it was in vain because
the connection at C7T3 had all kinds of solder but no actual connection.
How many Ohm?
Often times we see that people
have accidentally knocked off resistors during a installation. The
function of a resistor is to control current between two points.
In this example a resistor was placed in a blob of solder over the two
points creating a connection with no resistance like there should have
been.
How many mistakes can
you find?
This install takes
the award for most mistakes in one job. Can you find all of them?
Maybe I should say can you find anything right!
