Easy idiot-proof trick to replacing LCD connector on Macbook logic board.

hi today we're going to start with what should be a very simple job it's going to be a MacBook Air Board that has no backlight and when you look at the board it should be really obvious why so let's see what I got here on the microscope camera and yeah burned burned red probe points you're also going to see by the LED driver that yeah red now under the chip looks healthy which is a good thing so we actually I do have a healthy feedback bow there so I have discussed in other videos how if the feedback is not connected how it's not going to work properly so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to replace the LCD connector on here this is not an lvds connector this is display port since it is an air and the airs do not use screens that use lvds so we're going to take the hot air station here going to turn up the heat a little bit now one of the things about the hot air you see how the chip right over here this chip I'm 99% sure is Thunderbolt and display port we don't want to Reflow that so I'm going to point my hot air in a direction where I'm not going to be blowing the hot air over it because I I don't want to screw things up that don't need to be screwed up so one of the issues with the air that some people get themselves into is that they mess up the display port and Thunderbolt circuitry when they remove the LCD connector because they're blowing the air the wrong way and they just they Reflow or they [ __ ] up that ship and that's something we want to avoid doing because it decreases our ability to collect money at the end you can see here I'm heating the hell out of this old connector I don't necessarily really care if it gets destroyed cuz I am replacing it so my hot air station has very intermittent heat compared to what it used to have so that's something that I got to got to look into fixing so then after that we're going to take my iron which is going to beep in a second like it always does I can't stand that beeping and we're going to clean the old board which means turning on my fume extractor so that I don't get cancer because you guys know as I've stated in some other videos I really don't want to get cancer it's it's not on my bucket list so make sure that is where it's supposed to be and we're going to start cleaning so before we start the cleaning process I'm going to put a little bit of flux on the board to help the solder flow this is amtech 559 hopefully you can even hear me between my air condition ier the fume extractor the computer fans I'm surprised the hot air station you you really can't hear anything here I can barely hear my own damn voice so let's get started so I'm going to run this solder over here [ __ ] fly I'm going to piece of [ __ ] I'm going to now that is that is pretty nasty we're going to have to run a jumper wire there most likely let's just take a look get an idea of what we're up against so this is obviously pad for for LCD backlight and that doesn't look any good that's it's already all you saw how hard it was to get anything up on the board in that section that was because that you know got destroyed and burned so I'm going to be running a wire for that I don't want to trust that that's actually going to work and conduct electricity so that piece of board that looks nasty we're just going to take it and goodbye get out of here come on [Music] I don't want that see the thing is I don't want that piece potentially burning itself into the board and touching ground in a manner where I can't separate it or in a manner where I have to do more work later cuz that that does happen a lot and you get a little hole on the board in that section and then it winds up spreading and no thank you so one of the things I'm going to do now is with my multimeter is I want to check and make sure that there's no short to ground because I would be surprised if there was not a short to ground at this point so let's get the multimeter on the table I'm going to put this in diode mode zoom in on it so you can actually see it damn this office is too bright you put this at the right angle you can't read a damn thing there we go little bit more zoom so we take the red probe and we put it on grounds just going to use one of the pieces of metal by the screw hole here and then the other Probe on the output of backlight and there's no short to ground so on an LP 8550 base board anywhere from 0.519 to 0.546 is usually in the range of what you're looking for so that's good I'm happy with that I'm set and that being said time for me to get to work with cleaning and putting on a new connector so the wick that I use is called Goot Wick um we like to joke around here since there's a bunch of Chinese stickers on it that that is you know some some Chinese manufacturers misspelling of good Wick or mispronunciation misspelling I know we're not funny but corny jokes help the day go by so I put some flux on the board just to assist with removing the old junky solder if you run the wick across like so and if you use goodwick like gwick removes everything and makes you look like you're better than you are that's thing about good tools they make you look smarter and better and everything than what you actually are and that's exactly what I need I want tools that are going to make me look like a genius even when I'm a [ __ ] so one of the things I just did which you should never do but luckily I was on a ground pad is pick up the wick you want to kind of drag the wick Along by the wick while you're pressing down with the iron you don't want to actually like take the heat away and then move the wick because you you know exactly what's going to Happ happen there you're going to do that and then the the pad is going to come off with it because it's going to have a chance to cool down all right we've gone through there and I'm fairly satisfied that that is clean now just get rid of some of the so that I can lay a connector down flat on the board this is a board that has holes in it which means aligning this is going to be very very easy there's a hair on there but freaking cute too I left my brush in the other room I could either pick up the brush or I could get rid of this little hair particle whatever that's the thing a lot of people talk about like there was this one troll in some other video that's going you know you should use a brush not a Q-tip and it's like you know the brush is in the other room but I have a Q-tip right next to me I'm probably going to use the Q-tip you know what I'm saying it's just a matter of efficiency oh son of a [ __ ] these are not the connectors that have those little spokes in the bottom which means manual alignment oh oh well I'll find a way to live so yeah see see there's these holes on the board and when you get the right connector that it'll actually align itself with the spokes and it's beautiful and it's amazing but when you don't have that you have to do the alignment yourself which is awful and miserable and Nightmare you'll see in a second what I'm talking about so we take the connector and we move it into place I hate connector soldering by the way this is like there's no brain usage in this there's no troubleshooting there's no thinking this is just you know this this is just pure manual labor and I hate it it's like it's easy to solve but it's not easy in terms of it's miserable I hate doing connectors so I put some flux on that side of on the board I push down on the connector as hard as I can to make sure that it's actually being pushed up against the board now the thing is I don't have enough hands to do this properly so you're supposed to always be flowing new uh solder you can't just take solder and like you know put it on the iron and then attach it to where you want to attach it to that doesn't work it burns up all the flux inside of the solder and then it doesn't flow properly the problem is I need to hold the connector down with one hand the iron with the other hand and the soldo with the other which gives me which means I need a total of three hands and unfortunately I was only born with two so what I do is I put flux down there so that even you though the sold is nasty and doesn't have any flux inside of it it will once you know I flow it on there and there you go so it's going to be stuck down there now which means that I can now go about doing the pins one by one now there are a lot of people that do the pins one by one and they do a damn good job of it this is even a demonstration on the hacko website and I've seen people that are much worse at General motherboard repair than I am doing that very very quickly and it's pretty impressive and I suck at it so if you know if you this is if you're a troll of the channel this is actually an excellent time of troll because I am one of the worst connector solderers that you will find I mean really this is this is not my thing this is something that I am bad at okay so this the idea is you want to kind of do something like this you want to like you know go here yeah flux going down there and you're going to put the solder over here now with you you can actually know how to hold it without moving it all the time you'll be you'll be able to have hands that stay still and it'll be easier so it's not going to be like this crap that I'm trying to do here yeah this this is sad so you're going to try to go along one pin at a time like so and what's going to happen is probably something like that like where where if if your hand moves moves the way mine does and has just no ability to go where you want it to it's just it's just going to become a mess so what I do is I usually wind up giving up and doing uh sad attempt at drag soldering again I have done one pin at a time before I've done it many times but it's just it's so such a nightmare for me so what I do is I have flux running all along there I make sure that I'm touching the bottom of the board more than the pins I do something like this see that and the solder that's on the iron winds up attaching itself to all the pins it's actually better for me usually if I just put the sold on the pins instead of have it on the iron and then just kind of drag it over see that this is what this is what I like to call cheating that's the cool thing about being a grownup you're allowed to cheat and as long as you get the result that you want you get away with it so I have a tool that makes this easier so if I were still using you know the $10 piece of [ __ ] iron that I I did a video on before if I were using that $10 iron this would be a [ __ ] nightmare but because I'm using this hacko FX 951 with the 2027 and this nice curved tip this curved tip is by the way very very critical so you may be wondering why do I have a tip that's curved instead of those standard soldering iron tips where they're like where they're conical and they're huge at the end that tip doesn't do [ __ ] this curve tip you see you see I want a curve tip because the whole point of the movement is something like this that's why I want the tip that is curved because it's going to help me with my movement so I did that entire connector in seconds and I required no skills so you saw when I was trying to do it one at a time and like how just how sad it is you know and how bad it was and that I couldn't even get my damn hands to you know to get this a by the pin without it taking me 20 seconds but then when I cheated I was able to do the entire connector in seconds and it came out you know those those are not bad joints I mean really that's like that's the way it's supposed to be and that's that is you know just a little bit of cleanup for that ridiculous asinine amount of flux that I had on there and it's going to look good and you know I was able to align it even though I'm not using the the one where it aligns itself so just going to I want to get solder on both ends of that so that's why we we did that we we want solder on both ends of this not just on one so we're going to go we going to do something like this since there's flux there and but an absolutely minimal amount the reason that I want it to be a minimal amount is because I don't want solder flowing in the inside of the connector because if it flows in the inside of the connector then it becomes an utter nightmare to actually insert the cable in this is not so important if you're doing this for yourself but if you're doing border pairs for clients that are going to be reassembling these what the client is going to do is they're going to reassemble the machine and they're going to rip the connector off of the board because is their and and that that that's just bad so if you know you can get away with messing that up a little if it's for yourself because you'll know what you did and you'll know what you have to do to make it work but again if you're doing this for other people you cannot get solder inside of there if you get solder inside of there just [ __ ] redo the job because again they they will uh it it won't end well you really have to make things idiot proof you have to make it so that you know like a 2-year-old can put the [ __ ] back together without breaking it and that's I cannot stress that enough okay so then the next thing that I'm going to do is I want to actually go over the work and see if I uh messed anything up cuz keep in mind I mean it's not like I slded each individual pin I I just I put flux I made sure that it was making good contact and touching and then I I just dragged it all the way over very quickly and a you know very uncontrolled movement so I don't have the greatest expectations now as you can see I did mess up a little bit over there let just blow some of the alcohol and chunk away so we're going to fix that real quick see what good FL does like do you see what good flux does what good tools do I mean again like I I'm I'm barely qualified to [ __ ] solder and I and that that just it all disappeared like you're going to use cheap flux you're going to use some kingbo [ __ ] and when you use that you're going to put that there and the solder instead of just instantly just flying right back on your iron it's just going to the a just going to stick there it's going to fly and it's going to look at you and laugh and say [ __ ] you and you know what I'm talking about if you tried to do this and you failed cuz you know everybody remembers their first LCD connector and something like this where was just as frustrating as hell and you just wanted to cry and give up and scream and cuz because it it sucks you know when the first time you're doing it nothing is working the way you want come on stick on them or even like now when it's you know the 2,000th time you're doing it and you can't even get the thing to work the way you want you you guys know what I'm talking about you people who have tried to do this and failed are you people who don't have such a large ego that you forget what it's like to be new at something you understand what I'm talking about here so you know so what I'm going to do is I'm going to clean it again with the alcohol and then I'm going to go through each pin one by one to see that this [ __ ] actually works so I'm looking for is I want to see that the pins themselves have actually been soldered on now one of the other things that makes the drag soldering process that process that I did a lot easier even though again I am a complete Nutter hack when it comes to just basic basic hand soldering one of the things that makes made it a lot easier is that is that it was making good contact so the Conta that the pins are making with the board is is going to have a lot to do with it so as you saw when I was soldering on the ends of this when I was putting the ends of the connector on I was pushing on this really like I was pushing on that thing really really hard you can see the board is flexing on the desk when I push but I have when you push on this as hard as you can and then I put the ends on each one of the pins is actually like pushing against the board a little bit and that's what you want you want that tension so that as soon as I go to solder it there's nothing in between the pin itself and the pad that's exactly what we're looking for so I'm going to take my tweezers and I'm going to take my microscope over to 30X I'm going to try to take it over to 30X now at 30X I'm going to look at each pin and I'm going to move it like this it's really hard to stay and focus at 30X I'm going to go one I'm going to poke at the pin and I want to see if the pin moves so pin two moves however pin two is attached to ground so I don't care pin three moves because there's no pad there pin four moves because there's no pad we're going to be putting a wire on that that's from the Q-tip that I just used Let's see we got pin five pin six pin seven pin 8 Pin N9 pin 10 pin 11 Pin 12 pin 13 pin 14 pin 15 pin 16 pin 17 18 19 20 21 that's out of the microscope here 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 again you should be doing this when you do these types of connectors it doesn't take a lot of extra time to go back and make sure that they're connected even if they look connected sometimes they cannot be connected I'm actually going to go back and redo that little ground section even though I know it absolutely positively does not matter worth a [ __ ] and will work just fine it's going to bother me just knowing that it's there like that yes I am everybody here makes fun of me for being an OCD freak on the things and just wasting time on things that don't matter so let's see if there's also a chance that that was part of the board that was burnt and that I'm just kind of being silly by even trying to fix it and that it does look like it may be the case I may just be yeah who am I kidding that's burned away there's nothing there so but pin two on this is nothing anyway just there's nothing even going to it so I mean all right so now the next thing that we're going to have to do is we're going to run a wire from the back light and so again this is something that you can find if you have the board View and the schematic and I just don't feel like opening it for the 50 million times to show you a basic circuit but this is part of the backlight this is a um bypass capacitor on the output of backlight we're just going to run a wire from there to there and again all these little hairs and this little crap as long as it's not there when you're actually sold you're fine like again I'm not a big fan of using Q-tips because 99% of the time I can use a Q-tip or it's not going to leave [ __ ] behind sometimes I I do but when I do I always make sure it's when I'm not actually doing the soldering I don't want to leave hairs and stuff I pick them away or blow them away before I actually start soldering you don't want that inside your joints but this I'm going to run a wire from here to there and this is then going to get dumped into the Ultras Sonic and toothbrush heavily to get rid of all that crap flux and other junk okay so now I got to find my little wires which are going to be somewhere over here what's up 8:00 I can I may be able to leave earlier if you want to meet talk or anything yeah so maybe maybe we can meet when I leave at 8 yeah that works for me I'll see you [Music] then [Music] [Music] okay I'm done with that now for that fuse that looks like [Music] crap bye-bye now we're going to turn it on and you'll be able to see that we have a backlight no Shadows on the bottom which happens when you don't solder the LED returns properly so that's about that

Channel: Louis Rossmann

Views: 168,401

Keywords: macbook lcd connector replacement, macbook no backlight, macbook air logic board repair

Id: 5NSSsKfU4rA

Length: 25min 35sec (1535 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2015