Had a customer ask me to "just solder it back" on a 15 year old motherboard

Last Tuesday this guy walks into my shop with a gaming PC from like 2009. He points at a cracked capacitor cluster near the CPU socket and says "can't you just solder it back on?". I had to explain that caps don't just pop off clean - they take traces with them. Plus the board had corrosion around 3 of the 4 mounting holes. He got pretty upset when I quoted him $85 for diagnosis alone and said a fix probably wouldn't hold. Anyone else get people thinking soldering is like gluing a broken toy back together?

3 comments

3 Comments

jesse_cooper25d ago

Read somewhere that some folks think soldering is just hot glue for electronics... saw a video where a guy tried to fix his laptop by melting solder over a busted chip with a lighter. Makes you wonder where people get these ideas, like maybe from those repair shows that skip over all the tricky parts. The whole trace-lifting thing is the real killer though, you can't just blob it back and hope for the best.

elliotr3922d ago

Man I feel that, @joseph_coleman, I lifted a trace on my first board trying to blob a capacitor back on and it took me a week of scraping solder mask to fix it. What finally worked for me was getting a cheap practice kit off Amazon to mess up before touching real gear.

joseph_coleman25d ago

Right? That lighter video is insane, I've seen a guy try to "reflow" a GPU with a heat gun on full blast and just melted the plastic frame around it. The cap thing is the worst because people see one loose part and think it's a simple fix, not a whole board autopsy.