My Honda Prelude had a dash light come on for the 4ws. After testing the wiring, everything pointed towards the 4ws computer. So I cracked it open and had a look, there were a few dry solders, which I haphazardly reflowed with a regular soldering iron. Still works to this day.

I'd love to win the soldering station, as I have had to repair a lot of things using a regular soldering iron, and melted the surrounding plastics due to the huge tip.

This is a story where i was just a dumbstruck watcher, but it has to be said as it's proof of an incredible craftsmanship in one of my colleagues.

We designed an embedded irrigation controller around the beaglebone black, and ordered a couple of fully assembled prototypes. The main controller was a TI ARM in BGA324 package. Somehow we managed to forget about the reset pin and couldn't reliably boot up from the eMMC chip which had a custom linux image.. we didn't even route that net!

Then my colleague G. comes along... he examined the layout, bought a mechanical edge finder for his CNC mill,  and milled mounting holes for our PCB. He then screwed the PCb onto his platform, found the edge of the board, took a measurement in altium designer and guided the mill to that exact position, and drilled down a hole, exactly beside the reset ball of the controller, but without touching the IC itself.. this was a 6 layer board.

So, after he had visual on the ball, he soldered a wrapping wire onto it, by heating the wrap wire with his soldering station, centered the wire in the hole so it doesn't short with any other nets or any of the two power planes.. and soldered the other end onto a superglued connector.

He did this on three prototypes and all of them worked at first try. Insane. Should I win anything with this story, I will gladly pass it to him. Absolutely insane.

I'm fairly new to repairs but have managed to fix a few things for local people free of charge, I'm a hobbyist not a business. Sone things i have mended include a vacuum cleaner (faulty on/off switch a Roberts radio (faulty power supply capacitor).

Glenn

My best repair was 250 watt SMPS based on half halfbridge typology.

Output voltage regulation was big challeng there was some PCB design related Issues, I had fixed that Issue and saved my day.

Damn. Congrats and nice job.

I'd send you a better iron but I don't have a good iron either xD

johnsayre  Congratulations on saving the day!  Big Win, Super Dad!  Thanks for sharing.  Anytime any one of us can be the guy or gal a 6-year old thinks we are, that's a huge victory.

Also. welcome to the community.  As you've already seen, there are lots of helpful folks here.  It's awesome.

Thanks for the assist! I think the problem was posting from my phone instead of my computer...but post is edited and my kid smiles upon you all!

Hi John,

Well done on fixing the car and cheering your son up - bet he'll remember forever the year "dad saved Christmas" .

If you need to ever add a photo it should be the 7th icon along as highlighted in red in my screenshot below:

My story just happened today... our six-year-old added a last-minute request for an r/c car for Christmas, so we bought one from a dollar store as a stocking stuffer (do you see where this is going?). Well, you get what you pay for, because this particular car was dead on arrival. The kid's eyes lit up when he opened it, we popped in the batteries and then...nothing but a lit LED on the controller. The kid broke down in tears and I promised to try and fix it, in spite of being totally new to electronics. Today (Dec. 26) I disassembled it and found 5 broken solder joints which I managed to resolder with my cheap $10 soldering iron. To my amazement, when I put it all back together it actually worked! We now have a very happy kid and a rather proud dad.

(Note: I took a photo of said happy kid and his new car, but can't figure out how to post it.)

EDIT: Here's the photo of the Christmas miracle:

Nicholas,

Any day with a raise is a good day.

Dubbie