27 Jun
2006
27 Jun
'06
3:36 a.m.
der Mouse wrote:
This reminds me of one of the repairs I'm proudest
of.
Back in the late '70s, early '80s, sometime like that, back a little
after the very first home videogames came out (I'm talking Pong era
here), my father and I often scrounged at the local dump. One year,
along about December 27th or so, we found such a game which had a big
break right across it, as if it had been run over with a bicycle or had
a pipe-frame chair crush it or some such.
It proved to be a single-sided pc board, and no components were
cracked, just the board. I spent an hour or so solder-bridging the
broken etch runs, built a new case for mechanical support, and voila, a
working game!
Heh heh heh... friend dropped her TV (in 1987). I got
the call: "Can you fix it?"
The corner of the PCB that supports the flyback had snapped
right off. Thankfully, nice big foils so laying "untwisted"
stranded wire across each broken land with a *big* soldering
iron (to heat up all that extra Cu) solved that problem.
TV is running to this day! ;-)