Flexgate A1707 MacBook screen webcam repair with Paul, live from Rossmann Repair Group

hello everybody so every good stream should start with cat hello mr clinton no that was a weak meow oh you're tired aren't you say hi to everybody no he doesn't want to say hi he's tired nope we got a clinton sitting up hey he's tired and doesn't want to be bothered hi everybody let's get that out of the way that's not what was in the way that's the one that's in the way so uh let's talk a little bit about um flexgate there seems to be some um misconceptions and misinformation in our industry a little bit still about flexgate uh so flexgate is something that affects all of the 2016 2017 and early 2018 machines all the ones that are 17 00 something the 1706 1707 1708. every single one of these machines if you look in and find um apple's press release on this thing it's a long url but we have a shortened one it's bit dot lee you lied to me so if you go to that you'll find the the link for apple's service program for this you see that it's all running out all the machines are no longer covered by this and they claim that it was only a small percentage of machines are affected by this that's an outright lie every single machine that they produced in 2016 2017 early 2018 is affected by this and i'll take to show you what i'm talking about here no i'm not moving to texas i have too much family around here too much going on outside of work i'm not moving to texas so i will probably be starting my own company doing this so especially if there's an overlap between lewis closing new york and opening in texas you can come find me i'm in the middle of forming the company right now so i can't really take any work yet but it's um p s e nj.com will be my url when i'm ready or ps-electronics.repair you can find me on either one of them or find me on youtube and the links will be in my description in youtube so we take a look at um this is this is a 1707 from uh 2018 2017 i think this this model is the area we're concerned with is right down here this is where the screen connects to the rest of the board so this is the actual cable that connects from the screen board to the the logic board and then this control board here called the t-con board all of these little cables here are what run to the glass panel itself and bonded to the glass panel so i already did the um the backlight flexgate on here and the other one the other ones that's affected here is the webcam so today we're going to be doing the webcam what are you yelling about so you want to go out one moment please where are you you want to go out there you go yeah you want to get out so let me see if i can zoom in on this one i might just have to switch to the microscope camera so you can see a little bit here i'll go into the microscope camera too to really illustrate it but um so these wider cables here these these wide flex cables this is for the image this is this is what carries all the image data to the the um glass panel in the screen this little one here uh is the webcam everything for the webcam and this little one here is for the um backlight so this one breaks almost all the time just the makeup of the cable this has a larger pieces of copper in it so there it just makes the cable a little bit more brittle this one breaks almost all the time this one does not break that often but it still is affected the same way where it's just too short for being in here you can see kind of in this angle here you can see that this one it loops around it looks like it's looping around the same distance as this one this one you can tell that it just loops a lot quicker it disappears a lot a lot sooner than this one does it doesn't go out as far so let me show you under the microscope what this looks like this is beyond planned obsolescence this was um just an oversight by apple and they should have did a lot a lot more to correct this for their customers this this was this was pretty bad on their customers the way they did this so there we can see that this is this is a great view of this is the backlight one this one has already been repaired so the backlight one is now just a tiny bit longer even than the image one so you can see where it loops around underneath and this one and you can see the the beginning of my repair there is on the other side of the loop it's it's cut right in the spot where that does not flex that's just going to move back and forth in a straight line that never bends there so it's okay for us to cut and solder on that point right there you don't want to cut anywhere where it's going to keep bending or else it'll fail again but then we come over here to this side and you see how much shorter this cable is than this look at all the space in here this is the image cable and it's way out there and this is the the camera cable look at how much shorter that is and now if i open up this let me see if i could set this up this might be a little difficult try to do it on the overhead so i don't make you sick from the microscope bouncing around so i'm going to set this up over the edge of the the desk i'm opening up the screen over the edge of the desk and i didn't get into this yet so i didn't do the first thing of let's disconnect the battery these tweezers are terrible where are my tweezers okay disconnect battery now let me show you what this looks like what what is going on here microscope view now you see this isn't this is open at a 90 degree angle this is uh what you would normally have your macbook or your laptop open when you're sitting at a desk so it doesn't stretch it that bad but you can see that there's a little bit of a bend in there a little bit of a cut in there now if i go a little bit farther out so say you're standing at your desk and you open your screen all the way see how tight that gets to where it completely ripped the cable now this gets even worse on the other side on the the um the backlight side backlight always fails on these so this is beyond this is this is the extremity of how far the hinges will let the macbook open so i'm not i'm not going crazy here i'm not pushing this beyond what what it's allowed to open this is just how far the hinges will let the macbook open and you see how the image one has plenty of room still it's still bouncy in here it still has plenty of room to go but the camera one and the old backlight one was completely stressed to breaking if we go over to the new backlight one you see the new backlight one is perfect there's plenty of room in here it's never gonna break again so what flexgate does is that these these cables break and the how it manifests how you're going to see it is that you'll take your your laptop and you'll start opening the the top to go use it and you open it up a little bit and you're gonna see that the the backlight has come on the machine's working it just turned on and then i open it up the rest of the way and somewhere in the middle all of a sudden the backlight just turns off your screen goes dark if you take a flashlight and angle it at this at a certain angle on the flat on the screen you can see that the image is still there but it's just dark so that is flexgate flexgate has nothing else to do with screen artifacts or vertical lines on the screen or strange every other horizontal lines or something like that that has nothing to do with flex gate there is another thing called dust gate where the large image wires the the way that they're routed through here they're pressing up against some some metal and if you get a piece of sand in there it just pressing up against that sand will eventually poke a hole through the cable and could break one of the cable lines and then you wind up having one single line in the screen or something like that but that's not flex gate that we call that something different it's dust gate it's very rarely fixable sometimes you can get away with fixing it most of the time that just means a new screen but flexgate is very fixable that these these cables are very replaceable uh what we do is just graft an extra cable onto it there's some people that take the whole screen apart and put a whole new cable on i'll show you the cable that i'm putting into this now so we're doing we're going to do the the camera side here and this is the new cable so we're not going to use this whole cable because we're just going to cut off what we need and graft it onto the old cable because the rest of this cable that goes to the screen is fine there's nothing wrong with that it's just right here because it's too short and it just cut off right here so let's get into it we're going to start taking this apart tools let's say sorry i should have got a little bit more set up before i started the stream so you're saying don't take your macbook to the beach uh macbooks probably hate going to the beach because it has everything that they hate they don't want water they don't want sand they don't want sun you know using your macbook out in your backyard on a nice sunny day it's impossible the things overheat the like the first thing you'll notice is that it shuts down the webcam like i i had some i attended a party one time where they had people on a zoom meeting that couldn't attend the party and it was running on a macbook on a table in the backyard and the webcam turned off and it wouldn't run anymore because it was too hot so yeah the this beating sun sand and heat and and water your macbook is not made for the beach so first thing i did was i took the cover off of the camera connector here took the cover off of the um the whole screen cable i took this one plastic cover off because we need to take the wi-fi and bluetooth antenna out to get all this apart so that's that's it for my t3 so now i'm going to switch over to t5 and we need to disconnect the the antenna so i'll unscrew the antenna there then we'll unscrew the t-con board my brother has a 1707 with a flex gate issue after weeks of contacting apple no dice for warranty repair how much do we charge for the repair uh here we charge 325 for one side so if you just need the um the backlight then that's 325. if you need both of them then it's a hundred dollars more for the second one because unfortunately i didn't notice that this was bad or else i would have done it all together and that that's what makes it worthwhile to charge a little bit less because we do it all together but now i'm having to start this like it's a whole other job because i did not notice that until i went to go test and make sure all the function was done when i get my business set up i'm going to have a uh a little bit less overhead because i'm going to be running from running out of my uh my basement for for now anyway so i'm going to be charging uh 225 for one side and then 325 for both if you need it so but that's not going to be for a while until i get my business set up okay now we switch over to our pentalobe one and we need to take out all of these ground plane screws here what screwdriver is that that is the wow stick f1 or one f one f f1 one f something like that it just says wow stick thing works really good on macbook stuff people complain that it doesn't have enough power for like uh xboxes or playstations but all of these little screws it works great on these i'm not i'm using a manual screwdriver because they're a little bit more delicate these little pentalobe ones they're so tiny that it's really easy to to strip them out so it's a little bit harder to do so i do it straight by hand so i have a real feel for it and when you're dealing with something like this i i see that there's a lot of um technicians a lot of other shops that just don't understand the fundamentals of how to screw out or in a screw there's so many times number one every six months evaluate your screwdrivers throw away the ones that are getting worn out every six months you just make it a rule that that and you know christmas and then christmas in july you gift yourself some new screwdrivers and every screwdriver every bit that you have that's that's really um dull or anything either sharpen them up you can take a sanding block and sharpen them down a little bit or throw them away and get get new ones all the time and then when you're dealing with something like this these these little tiny screws first you need to find and make sure you're all the way in in the uh the screw so don't don't try to to torque on it until you're sure you're engaged fully in the screw so you got to get on top of it now i'm fully engaged and now i give downward pressure so i'm going to push down pretty hard too once i know i'm fully engaged only i push down pretty hard and i give it a twist and then i can loosen up and just unscrew it the rest of the way always that that first turn you're engaged always that first turn i give a nice hard pressure down real quick turn and then screw the rest of the way out always make sure you're using the right screw screwdriver always make sure your screwdrivers are not worn out this this is the tools of your trade if your trade is working on these things always make sure you have the best tools you can get i used to be an automotive mechanic years ago so that was what i did before i came to work for lewis five years ago and it's it's a lot more important techniques on how to remove uh fasteners in cars than it is for this let's disconnect our antenna wires now we can pull the antenna out and the wires just follow through there we go that's our wi-fi antenna wi-fi and bluetooth antenna so now i'm just disconnect the screen cable now i'll disconnect the webcam cable here and there's our webcam cable now i'm going to take this thing turned out to be absolutely perfect for this this is the um stencil holder for one of those big reballing frames it has all these like springs on it and everything that holds the chip in the center so that you can just pour lead balls and then shake it around and they all fill in the holes this turned out to be the perfect height and the perfect size and everything to work on this stuff so it makes a perfect stage for us to work on this so the first thing i'm going to do is just create a fresh working environment for myself on this so i take some some polymed tape some captain tape just give a nice new flat surface for us to work off of process of putting bearings in a ford 8a different differential i worked on one of them once ford 8.8 mostly ford nine inches i work on 8.8 are a little bit more rare okay so if we look close at this we can see where where it wants to bend where the the the flex was and we can see where it wanted to be straight so that somewhere in here is our safest place to cut it and graft in our new piece so i'm just going to lay it out flat here i'm going to tape it down i'll just stretch it out tape it down yeah anil i've already done them annel is not in this country right now he is on vacation enjoying himself what time is it over there why is he even watching the stream because he has nothing to do are you playing binding of isaac again on on vacation for crying out loud okay so now it's nice and flat and right about there is where i'm going to wind up cutting it so you see it's past where it wants to bend up right where it's going to stay straight so right maybe a millimeter away from the tape is where i'm going to cut this so now we take our new one and i want to cut this right with it so i'm going to tape it right here with it get the t-con board out of the way now this is this is an operation that you wish you had another hand so i'm going to so by accident three millimeters is what we want it to be longer than the original cable than the oe cable but this little this little piece here this little screw hole piece is just about the perfect length extra so i'm just going to make this that much longer i'm lining up the the so i'm looking at this i can see the end of the the old cable and i'm just putting this new cable that's where i want the the end of the old cable so this is this much longer this is where the old cable stops it's this much longer than that and that's going to be the perfect amount of length for the new cable so now we'll tape that in the exact same spot that i taped the other one you always want to take your time doing this step because setting it all up right is just going to make it easier down the road okay hold it down there and i want to tape this straight as i can and right where i have the other tape i'm probably blocking your view aren't i i kind of got to see what i'm doing here okay there you go so now when i look at this under the microscope and i pick where i'm going to cut i'm just going to cut straight across here now one of the big keys to doing this is using a really sharp exacto knife so exacto knives it would be impractical we do probably five of these a week or i myself do five of these a week the other the other uh technicians probably do some too i i'm not going to change a new blade every single time i do this so what i'm going to do is i have here a la former yogurt cup that it's a terracotta cup that has no glazing on the bottom i'm going to use that to hone the edge of my exacto knife this is going to make a really really sharp knife then i'll take a q-tip and just clean it off and then we can inspect it underneath the microscope and what you look for for a sharp knife you look straight into the the cutting surface and you don't want to see any reflection back at you so that's not exactly sharp because i see a bright spot coming back at me see back here back farther this is really sharp because i i see a couple abrasions but i don't see a bright spot shining back at me so i want that bright well the bright spot's a little high so i'm not going to be cutting into that but i want to get rid of it anyway so let me sharpen it a little bit more you also use a coffee cup or something there you go there's one nick in there but we're not going to get anywhere near cutting there we're going to cut all the way down towards the tip which is really sharp because you don't see any any reflections coming back at us there so let's go over to our work area so now here's our two cables i can't really get them on screen that well i have a cat in here yelling at me let's see what the cat wants permit me one moment oh we got an oreo in here let's say hi to oreo [Music] the little oreo he wants to go back out he came in here to use the restroom there you go yes the cats are going to texas unfortunately lewis would probably give up oreo but i don't want oreo i want blackberry but my significant other uh she's allergic to cats so we need a hypoallergenic cat if i ever get a cat okay so now somewhere somewhere about here i think looks good i'm gonna check where it's bending where it wants to be straight yeah right about there i think i'm looking at it a little crooked let me see if i could straighten everything out because you know you're crooked is this is a critical point here so it's not that big of a problem if i mess up the new one because i could just go get another new one but i don't want to mess up cutting the original one so yeah right about there i'm just going to cut straight across try to be as straight as i can okay so that connector is discarded and right here we're just going to continue to cut straight across there we go now this is the one we need so i'll untape that i'm going to transfer the tape to the connector that we need and here's the connector that we need taped up the same way now we're going to work on exposing the traces so that we can solder to them okay sorry moving this is going to be a little bit jittery because i can't move the board i can't like normally when we do board repair on this desk i can move the board wherever i want but this is now stationary i can't really move this around well maybe a little bit because it's all on the rubber mat i guess i can't move it a little but it's safer just to move the microscope and only the microscope okay now we need to expose all of our traces so very gently i forgot my pen i'll get it when i need it okay just a little bit this now i'm going to start getting to the data lines and the data lines are very very very tiny traces in here they're extremely fragile extremely difficult to play with so you want to be real careful how much pressure you're putting on this so so right now all i'm taking off is the black coating i don't know if it's some kind of epoxy or if it's just paint or if it's plastic itself i don't know but i'm just going to take only that off and it still has some kind of other coating on top of it that i'll take off with a fiberglass pen okay i when i'm done working here when lewis moves i'm sure i will have more time to devote to my own youtube channel so i should be doing more repair streams and uh i also have like other photography stuff at home i have a black and white dark room i do large format photography so i'm going to be doing more of that stuff too but yeah sure once i get my business off the ground i'll stream the repairs that i get there you like me hearing you like hearing me talk about automotive stuff that is the very first video and turns out it's my most popular video on my little tiny channel that i have is me working on a um um what was it a boxer roof or just a porsche roof porsche porsche what however you want to pronounce it everybody goes yells at me as soon as they say porsche so porsche roof autumn um automatic roof what's your channel name uh it's just paul s uh it's really hard to find me the easiest way to find me is to look for um the microsoft band two so i used to really champion microsoft products and they made a um watch like this called the microsoft band and then the band 2 came out and the thing was just spectacular and i did a video tearing it down and changing the logic board and changing the battery and stuff and that is my second most popular video on my youtube channel and i'm like the only person in the [ __ ] world who did that so if you search for microsoft band 2 teardown you'll find my channel surprisingly i i did not buy a zoom i had an rca lira back in the day i never bought a zune sherlock holmes is that me hey co-pass so now we start scraping the new one ah copa's got uh got new york city real stated he thought he got a 870 square foot apartment but when measured it's less you want to grab my uh fiberglass scratch pen sitting in my terracotta cup on my desk it's red hi hi for some weird reason went out and bought um airpods the pros and he has always dropped them all over the freaking place one just fell out of his ear just now when he was over here i would have the a terrible time with them because like the just the headphones the apple headphones they do not stay in my ear i do not have the right shape ear for that okay the new one is made of a little bit more stuff so it's kind of kind of hard to get all of this off i think the scratch pen does a better job than this so wait for high high to get back with my scratch pin i think thank you so here i have a um fiberglass scratch pen so it's just a a basically it's a um lead pencil holder a drafting pencil holder but then you have these fiberglass scratch rods that go in it instead thing all kinds of hobbyist uses for all kinds of stuff really really good for for doing stuff like this so you see that it's it's just a bunch of fiberglass in a bundle that's not in focus for you just a bunch of fiberglass in a little bundle and the little pointy ends that you usually get stuck in your finger are out to do your bidding just pushing down nice and light on this one thing that with a lot of practice you get used to the worst thing you could do is come off of it like that and then on the way back up catch it and bend it over itself so you always have to positively lift up and then go back over here don't ask me how i know that is there commentary going on in discord you want to show me so this new one is a lot harder to scrape off than the original one you'll see as soon as i touch the original one they all become shiny pretty damn quick let's do a little bit of more scraping with the i don't like fiberglass pen because debris is on the table yes you see this stuff this stuff can get stuck in your finger and it hurts forever you'll you see that it's clear you can see right through it here so once that gets in your skin good luck finding it you know it's there because it's letting you know it's there but you can't find it to get it out it's awful so you just have to take extra precautions as soon as i'm done with with uh my fiberglass pen really even in between like right now i have my fingers close to it again so i'm going to take a piece of captain tape and i'm going to put it over top of all this and lift up all of that fiberglass i don't want any of that in my finger so we'll just lift it all clean with a piece of tape and then fold that tape in on itself and throw that away so okay with the little tiny ones uh so i've done a couple of these so far just a couple too and i want to try something different with the little ones if i can today i would like to only expose the middle of it i don't want to expose the end because the the these like to tear away from the flex really easily so would be better if i can just expose the middle of it a little bit but this is a feat i don't know if i'll if this is going to work out like i said this this uh the camera flex gate does not break as often as the um backlight flex gate so we don't do many of these see that's all i really want i want to keep the end intact underneath this uh whatever this coating is so then it has a better chance of surviving there would applying he'd be a good idea no no chemicals that would attack the coating probably not because um i want everything else to stay intact the rest of this cable needs to stay intact and in good condition so you don't want to heat it up because you don't want to damage anything that you're going to be keeping and you don't want to put chemicals on it because if a chemical will dissolve this how are you going to keep it right here and only dissolving here and not going farther up into your cable so that this is this is just be patient and work on just a little bit that's it see try to cut up into it i have to be real careful not to cut the trace these traces are minusculely thin i think the scratch pen will take the rest of that this looks tedious where's the dremel with the scotch brite wheel man that would be amazing if there was a scotch brite wheel small enough a little roll lock tool with a little scotch brite disk but you have to understand the sizes that we're working with here let me see what is something that can bring size relationship uh i have a quarter on me that's a little bit big so a quarter is a little bit big to show this so yeah then let's see where's something small and a quarter the in god we trust now the even the i and the in god we trust is bigger than any one of the traces i'm working on here except the big grounds sunny i forgot to turn on the amplifiers i didn't hear that how's it doing sunny so yeah that's that that shows you a little taste of what the size is that we're dealing with uh i think i don't have anything else that that gives a good size relationship no penny around here no dime a strand of hair for comparison i could do that i i will i'll pull out a beard hair when i get the um the wire that i'm going to be using the wire that i'm going to be using is smaller than these traces because you want something that's not going to put strain on the little tiny traces now the next precaution thing that i'm going to do this one's about ready so so i want to find out which one of these is ground so definitely the big ones are going to be ground well i don't know these are between data points so that might be a ground because anything that's not ground anything that has a signal or power to it i want to cut off the very end of that wire because the underside of this cable and the underside of the other cable is all a ground plane and because of you cut it and you scraped it now this is like bent and going underneath a little bit and especially once i put solder on here these things have a tendency of connecting to the ground plane and it will just destroy all the data that's going through it you anybody that works on this you may have seen this problem with your backlight flex gates if you do a backlight flex gate and then when you turn it on you have stage lights so um the way the backlight works is that you have one big heavy uh connector that's sending the backlight power to the backlight strip and then you have a bunch of little um return lines that's what's actually sending the ground we're kind of sending ground to the backlight diodes and if one of those gets shorted to ground where it's always grounded then that's going to make that that one set in the backlight strip say on high all the time so even if you turn the backlight all the way down i haven't seen this this feature in many other laptops other than apple i can turn the backlight all the way off to where the screen is still on but there's zero backlight like most computers you you turn the backlight all the way down you can still see the screen this backlight's still on apple you can turn the backlight all the way off which is good if you want to run something like leave your laptop open overnight and let something run you can just turn the backlight off so it's not shining anywhere but if you if one of these is shorted any one of these backlight returns is shorted to ground you get stage lights on the screen where whatever uh set of lights so it's one two three four five it so the backlight diodes go one two three four five one two three four five one two three four five all the way on the bottom of the screen so if number five is shorted to ground then the fifth uh led is just gonna stay on bright all the time so to stop that to keep that from happening what you need to do is the very end of the backlight returns anything that deals with power either the backlight power or the backlight returns we just want to nip off just a little tiny bit of that wire just like that and now there's no chance of that being wrapped underneath and getting grounded so i'm going to do that for all the signals and then i also need to figure out which ones of these are not ground and i need to do the same to that so i'm pretty certain that that's going to be ground and this is going to be ground let's see if we can ohm check some of this okay so i have my multimeter set to beat mode i don't know if that oh that can be heard uh well let's see here is that's ground that's the same that's not that's ground that's ground so i'm pretty certain the biggest one is going to be ground so the the one between the data lines is probably ground so that's it that's a really good way to go by the one between the data lines is most likely going to be ground so that's ground that's ground that's power that's ground so all of my data lines i'm going to nip off like this and then this other bigger one here this one's going to get nipped off in the same way so then i'm sure that nothing's going to get shorted when i solder it all back together let me get a little bit closer here i need to really see what i'm doing at this there's another point that you should sharpen your your blade too just like we did at the beginning mine seems to be sharp enough that that cut through that nicely so there now there's no chance of that wrapping around to the bottom because it's not all the way to the end none of them okay let's scrape this one a little bit more okay okay now we'll go over to the oe one and you saw how difficult it was to cut all of that and everything this one is going to be so much easier as soon as we take our fiberglass pen to this this is just going to wipe right off so not only are we making this a little bit longer so it's more comfortable i have a lot more confidence in these replacement cables that we're getting than the oe cables thank you paul for the twenty dollars i really should turn on the speaker so i hear that okay hopefully that's not too loud and scares the [ __ ] out of me because this is all delicate work no that is not too loud good another vote against fiberglass pens yes it's because of this this wonderful little stuff right here this is the only reason why people hate fiberglass pens you just have to take extra care you have to know that this is going to happen and you have to take extra care so again i'm going to take a piece of captain tape and we're just going to cover over all of that and then lift it right off there you go no fiberglass it's all caught in the tape are the fibers of cancer wrist like asbestos no basically it is the same thing but these are on a way bigger order of magnitude than uh asbestos asbestos is dangerous because it's um airborne it's so fine and so thin that it gets airborne and you can breathe it in and once you breathe it in it cuts into your lung tissue and the fibers never leave they just sit there and keep rubbing up against your lungs and cutting and that that's that's the danger of asbestos this stuff is big this stuff just sits on the desk it doesn't float anywhere okay so now we're going to do the same thing on this i'm going to cut all the ones that deal with data or power so this is probably going to be the 5 volt to webcam we're going to cut that back a little bit let me get closer so i can see what i'm doing for decades i've used the ink eraser pencils with a brush on one end to clean pcb tracers amazing still use them i buy them all the time i don't use the ink ones because the ink ones are a little bit too abrasive on some things i use the regular pencil erasers but yeah they they are amazing for cleaning charge ports uh cleaning up the contact pads on hard drives and stuff like that they're absolutely indispensable nobody here ever heard of that until they started seeing me do it now everybody uses them it's like an old school thing just use a pencil eraser okay let me see let me let me see if i can pull out one beard hair and show you the the size that we're dealing with here oh i got the whole follicle there's a beard hair that that's that's how big we're working with here so you see the the the space that's double the width of one of those things is about the same size as my my beard hair with follicle so yeah two of them yeah that's that's how small we're dealing with here okay so now we're going to line up the two now this one's a little indented from all the scraping so let me straighten that out i'm just going to compress it in my tweezers press it in my fingers try to get that to be straighter it's indented a little bit it's a little better and then let me get the right side a little bit more that's better and we're going to line it up and you see they don't line up exactly well this one is awfully close to there so i'm going to nip off some of this right here and cut off some of this trace right here so it doesn't get anywhere near where i'm soldering and zoom in that's a little bit washed out for you when i zoom back out i'll pay more attention to that readjust that there we go okay let me adjust that there you go now we're going to line it up okay that's the best it's going to line up uh this is a problem a little bit here because this is ground and this is power and these two corners are awfully close to each other so i'm gonna have to do a little bit trimming over there too is it possible to get original cable strip from the opposite side and solder together bga style yes and no you don't have much space to work with once you put it back in the machine and good luck finding cables that actually match up 100 because that you just it doesn't it just doesn't happen all of them are a little bit off like this almost all the time this one's pretty off though usually they're not this far off yeah that's as close as i can get it because these are lined up good these are lined up okay these are lined up mediocre this is terrible there you go now everything's a little farther away from each other okay so now the first thing we're going to do is solder the giant uh ground pads together and that'll just give us some stability to the entire unit so let me switch out my soldering iron tip so the usual micro pencil tip we use is this one and you can see it's way too big to work on anything here so the one i'm switching out for is this one which is the smallest one they make unfortunately and it's still a little big for working on this but it's the best you can do wow there's a lot of cat hair at the end of this let me clean this the flux tip is disgusting okay a little bit of flux right down the middle here oh i forgot lewis has the giant solder uh let me go get a length of my little solder one moment please i am back so yeah lewis's solder is a little bit bigger than what i would want so this is the one that i use on my desk it's about half the size and i took some of the flux that's fine okay first thing we're going to do is a little dab of flux or a little dab of solder at the end of our pico tip and i need to turn on the fume extractor and i'm going to try to hold down hold everything flat right here and just tap the ground there we go that one's not terrible but needs more cleaning another dab hold down this side there you go and that moved in a funny way or i don't know it's just the flux okay but we still have some space in between here i don't like the way this is holding up so let's remelt this while i hold that down there we go now it's nice and flat so now all the grounds are connected i'll go through and try to tin all of these a little more oh [ __ ] we already broke one so my idea of just keeping the middle of them is not working out at all already right from the very beginning so let's fix that up to clean it up get all the flux out of here and try to re-expose this a little bit this is a little bit big here i'm gonna have to take some of the solder off of it a little bit more flux some fresh solder and let's see if we can get this to 10 this time okay everything's tense nicely including the broken one that one's wiggling away i'm gonna cut that back a little bit so there we go okay now we're gonna take our uh should i do the no i'll do the i'll do the big ones first i'm going to take our regular size jumper wire so this is 44 gauge jumper wire and i'll go ahead and put that into these a little dark [Music] there we go so we're only holding this in my hand right now so it's kind of unstable once i get attacked and there we go tacked in there grab my tweezers there we go so okay we didn't turn the 5 volt ones let's get some solder on those there we go oops so there we go okay all of the ground and power is good now we have to go after these little tiny things so little tiny things are getting an even smaller wire this is point zero zero seven millimeter wire i don't know what that is in engage in [Music] non-metric gauge other than like holy [ __ ] that's how small this wire is it's as small as a cat hair try to line it up over one of them and i have to try to keep the smallest amount of heat on any of this stuff that's tacked let me zoom in some that is not typed okay no problem that is tight but not enough solder on it i need to add some solder to my pencil tip okay that was too much solder on my pencil clip and it combined with that okay don't argue with it it went to the second one then we'll do the second one first there you go second one soldered so okay that one soldered on nicely 33 this has got to be smaller than 33 gauge because the other one that i was working with is 44 gauge and this is at least half the size of that so this has got to be at least 50 something 60 gauge wire okay that one broke the trace broke off the thing that's fine get it off of the wire and just solder down here to where the trace is still at so oh [ __ ] i ripped it off okay all i did was rip off the solder off of the tray so a little bit of new a little bit of new uh solder let's get this to stick to that there we go that's a nice solder joint so the pears are actually the easier part to this once you get to the four is where it gets difficult a robot arm with improved accuracy would be so helpful yes it would this is small enough and and delicate enough that like if i if i don't steady myself the proper way my heartbeat gets in the way of me doing this job anybody walking on the floor in the vicinity gets in the way of doing this job ah that one went on so easy why can't they all be like that that's a 10 by 20 stereo microscope for smd work and it's amazing how much steadier and that's working on fine circuits there's there's a lot of uh tricks a lot of ways to hold things how to steady yourself how to hold yourself in your seat isn't that a part you can buy and replace and be done with it yes you can buy an entire screen for 700 and replace it and be done with it well actually this is this is 1707 so probably around dollars for a screen so yes yes i kind of have to control my breathing and my heartbeat as if i was on the shooting range so the one said they are hiring snipers it is basically the same exact control of movement is that i i like right now i'm just talking to you and and i can move around and everything once i get the soldering arm in my hand and i'm about to touch it with a soldering iron i do the exact same thing that i do when i'm on the range i i breathe out to my natural paws and breath and that's what i hold and i hold my my natural paws in breath and that's when i move in and solder and pull back away so those techniques really do come in play in hero so breathe in breathe out reach the natural pause of breath you'll never try to hold your breath and you don't try to breathe out farther than what is normally comfortable to your lungs just where you naturally stop [Laughter] i'm being too perfectionist with it it's soldered 82 gauge there you go see our normal jumper wire is 44 gauge i think i like to use 40 gauge a lot of times too i have that on my desk that didn't solder over here but this is 82 gauge i unsoldered the other side there we go so so yeah probably not the smartest idea to drink energy cans before doing this i'm actually running on one cup of lipton tea and a vente vanilla cafe frappuccino so uh i probably could be steadier than this if i didn't have that uh that starbucks uh no this is not this is um not low temperature solder this is regular 60 40 solder and my iron temperature because it's such a tiny point and it's hard to get a pump heat out into that tiny point it's still set at 840 degrees i believe that's in freedom units on the on the hakko wow do we really have enough live viewers to attract spam bots thanks for tuning in guys it's good to see you all here so so actually see my heartbeat in my tweezer hand so is anybody watching the top part when it popped off so i was watching what i was doing and then i saw the top popped off that deserves another sweet person use c210 tips in my soldering station what are the c210 is that the ones where the uh is that the one where you you slide the tip over the heater because none of them are exactly very good i would suggest get the actual weller brand name if you're getting them don't don't uh don't get some cheap ones or anything like that get the actual weller ones and if they're shiny if they're like um like polished solder doesn't like sticking to those polished ones you could also try getting one of the tip tenors one of those little um chemical paste tip tenders that you stick it into that that helps out a lot sometimes too if you're having trouble trouble tending your tips i don't know if that's touching don't do well our pace is the way to go i don't mind either one of them i really like the hakko stuff that we have here uh i have one pace um station at home i like it but i don't think uh pace is worth the money really pace is is unbelievably expensive i i can't justify that cost for for anybody really i really like the hakko the hakko is a good middle road it it's somewhat pricey and really good full of features it's not a are you doing a conical tip i guess it is a conical tip it's a point tip for the micro iron um it's the t30i the hakko t-30-i now the fx 951 base is the basic station that we would use here this is the fm 203 so it is it's basically like two fx950 ones so you could have two um two hand um two um yeah words hard two hand pieces connected to the same station controlled by the same station yeah pace is a tough brand so if you can find uh stuff used on ebay that that'll work for you just fine because they they are a tough machine so like even after the rigors of uh industrial life and then finds a new life on your desk it's still gonna work that's how that's how i got mine it was gifted to me by somebody it's a one of the desoldering stations with the pump and everything okay this this step is nerve wracking okay first off this this one ground needs to come down we made that ground way too big i'm gonna have to pull some of that solder off of this never do this don't ever wick with a tiny little sauna on do what i say don't do what i do unless you could actually pull it off without soldering everything together and ripping it apart cleaning this up is absolutely nerve-wracking because i i'm pretty much guaranteed that i'm going to rip one of these off because i'm going to catch a sharp end one of the cables one of the little wires that i put on there and rip it right off the and the best case scenario is that it just rips from the solder worst case scenario is that it pulls up the trace with the two and everything but we have to clean it up because we have to coat this with conformal coating so okay some of them don't look like they end well everything's soldered good but it doesn't matter if they look like they're a little bit too close together or anything because once we put the conformal coating on this everything's going to be frozen where it is nothing's going to be able to move so we don't have to worry about oh that that looks like it might it might slide into each other it's not going to happen [Music] and i'm gonna pull it up and clean from underneath it too and make sure there's no flux anywhere around it okay now we're ready to coat this uh let's take a look closer look at some of the soldering everything looks connected yeah that that'll do for me okay let me go get my uh conformal coating and my dental tool i forgot them one moment please okay i have some green uv mechanic solder mask i have a dental tool to spread it with like a pen i just dip my dental tool down into the solder mask and just dab it on the top of all this and i'm gonna cover every exposed metal point you want a nice thin coating with this i'm going to rub out that sharp point is this cures by uv light or near uv light so you don't want it too thick because if the uv light can't get through it it doesn't get cured so so so okay everything's good and coated now we'll take our near uv laser pointer it's actually really hard to see where i'm shining it at with the light on can i make that brighter no that's the best you guys can see with no light i can see it still it's really hard to tell where i've been with the light on so okay that side's done my god it's full of stars as i get whisked away into oblivion give it a quick wash now i'm going to do the back too give it back a quick wash you get a little bit of more coating on my dental tool and then this break the break in the back we're gonna coat that too okay i did not get enough on my bundle tool there we go okay clean off my dental tool real quick so i don't plop this stuff everywhere okay now we'll cure this so so okay clean that up too there's like an oily substance that comes to the surface of it as it cures so if we leave that on there then the captain tape won't stick to it now we pull off the captain tape that we put on here so we can clean under where it was i'll tape it a little bit farther out okay then we just want to clean up everything else use the new side of the q-tip make sure both sides are nice and clean now we're going to cut a piece of this thinner captain okay so this captain is just about the exact size of the solder joint that we do just want to get it to tack on nice and straight right there and i'll fold it around fold around nice and tight on that side this captain's in my way nice and tight to the cable it's pretty lined up good and just squeeze it into place give it a nice hard squeeze make sure it connects and i forgot my scissors be right back hello i'm back okay get my scissors in here and we want to leave a little bit of space so that the tape has something to stick to itself there we go okay we could clean up our work area i use the captain tape to pick up any dust or any more um shavings from the fiberglass pen there we go a nice clean work area for the next time we do it now we'll pull out the t-con board put this around it now the first test i do is i gently pull on the t-con board and see if it's the same length now now this before before this um got changed when you pull on this this would still have a lot of slack bending up because this was so much shorter that it would stop like there and you would see that this is this is really still bowed out now if i pull it out gently you see that everything is nice and straight so that this is now longer it sits in here nicer it's going to last a lot longer and these these two splices are in an area right in here where all it does is move backwards and forwards it doesn't bend at all so nothing nothing will harm on that at all and there you go that's a flex gate repair it's a double-sided flex gate repair you guys didn't get to see that side i did that yesterday now let's go ahead and test it out let me turn off this fume extractor oh blackberry we have a so you guys got to see mr clinton at the beginning at the beginning of the stream and then i brought oreo in but here's little blackberry she's my favorite she is such a little sweetheart hi say hi little blackberry she is such a little sweetheart i love this cat so much it's not focusing on her hi yes i just created a pc i turned a macbook into a pc okay let's see connected everything's safe to power on let's connect the battery and and we will test this so let me just get this connected up with a test os make sure it's turning on with no customer information on the screen it did turn on before so should be charged okay we got life recently bought a used 1398 for myself for 225. it's not bad known common issues with this model and how can i avoid them uh if it is the 2012 1398 u8900 is a common issue it cannot be avoided it just needs to be corrected and it may have to be corrected multiple times throughout its life uh if it's the 1398 that had that does not have a [Music] dedicated graphics if it if it's only the the one that has a cpu and that's it that one suffers from dying um cpu mosfets which just wind up killing the cpu sometimes you can save it by changing the cpu mosfets most of the time it's just dead other than that i don't think anything else is wrong with that model that model's a pretty good model okay so we're now loading our os i'll load high sierra on this weird sometimes the new os the new bios is doing weird things with the apple logo sometimes mario i do have my own channel it is out there i have not put much work into it but i will eventually put more work into it okay absolutely no reason to unlock their hard drive with their password with these old machines this is something good with these old machines we can log into our own os so i'm booting from an externally plugged in hard drive and booting into our own os we don't need your password unless you suspect something wrong with your os itself there's no need for us to have your password we can't get to your data we don't touch your data at all the new ones unfortunately we need your password to be able to log in and test anything it's kind of a pain in the ass i wish we could just external boot on everything so now let's open up facetime and check our webcam there we go hi that's you guys up there webcam works backlight works the other thing you check when you do the backlight you check make sure the back light goes down and you don't have the stage lights coming up and then it actually goes all the way out so there we go it's both flex gates completed on this now if we take a look here too i didn't screw it in yet but you can see there's more space in here late 2013 and you have the g-force now that if it has a g-force then that's the uh you do have an integrated graphics um the the cpu does have an integrated graphics that you use most of the time when you're on desktop stuff but then whenever you enable it whenever a program asks asks to use the dedicated you use the g-force so yes you have one of the ones with the dual so you don't have to worry about the um the cpu mosfets but uh late 2013 i don't think there's any major issues with that at all but yes you can see that this is now the same length if you go back to the beginning of the video and you saw how much shorter this was now it's the same length as the image cable so that's the the other side of flexgate there's only two things that flexgate can can ever affect it's either backlight or webcam if you have any other image stuff going on any lines or or distortions or anything else like that it's an lcd problem or the dust gate problem it's not flex gate so thanks for joining me good to see you all here and yeah keep a lookout for my channel um when lewis leaves i'll have probably a lot more time to work on my own content hopefully not that much time i'm hoping uh building a new website and getting the word out through some of you guys and everything i'm going to stay in jersey i'm not opening up a shop up here in new york um yeah that's you need capital to be able to start something like that so yeah anybody in jersey i'm in raw way um i'll take mail in just like louis does um i'm not going to be stocked for a while for parts and stuff like that so stuff like board repairs or or like this stuff i i can definitely handle but um like screens and keyboards and track pads i need to gear up on all that i need to get get stock shelves and get stock of all that that's going to be an expense i'm going to be working on all that uh so yeah that looks like it's going to be the path that i'm going to take uh this doesn't seem like many companies around here that do this like to pay their employees more than minimum wage so even after they see what i can do they they're they're offering like nothing compared to what uh what lewis has generously paid me over the years so yeah we're still here for a couple more months at least you'll see me a couple more times on the channel i'll come up with some more interesting things i don't like doing videos on stuff that i've already done before sometimes i do but this is something new we've only done one flexgate the regular flexgate on the channel before so i thought you all should see the the camera flex gate which is just infinitely harder than the um than the backlight flex gate well thanks guys be kind to the cats i love the cats oh i don't know if you guys saw um the posts like was it yesterday lewis posted or two days ago where uh mr clinton with his with his hiss oh man that that was hilarious so hi hi um he he has these cat ears that he had in his bag since halloween and messing around with him on halloween and he puts them on and little um blackberry is just intently watching him like she's she's so confused she has no idea what this new creature is and then he goes and looks at mr clinton and mr clinton was ready to rip his damn head off oh there's high high with his uh with his ears mr clinton was just ready to rip his head off it was so hilarious his tail got so puffy and so big and i happened to snap that picture at just the right time i got another one where where when he jumped to the side and spread out his legs and he was hissing he was he's all blurry in the picture but the blurriness makes it even better uh that that was fun we have some good fun with the cats around here i love these cats i want to get one for home but my my significant other she's allergic so we need something like a russian blue or siamese or something like that and russian blues that you're sure that they're a russian blue they're very expensive so we haven't got a cat yet because of that there's also some new science diet or something like that that's supposed to reduce the protein that makes you allergic so no the hairless cat actually that is that is not that does not help because it's not the hair that you're allergic to you're allergic to a protein that's in their saliva so a hairless cat still still licks their self and everything and still has that protein so you can still be allergic to a hairless cat but siamese and russian blues they have less of that protein but the russian blues are just so so adorable and love those cats so it's probably going to be a russian blue i don't care too much for siamese clinton dislikes imposters yes he does he he called that cultural appropriation and he was furious with it i'm glad i grabbed that picture though that was excellent in a community post yeah in a community post that uh lewis put on this this channel or the live channel i'm not sure which one it was i think it was this channel i also have some up on my instagram yeah if you see my my i have a i have a post all about it uh from yesterday on my instagram um uh a 2000 mhz on instagram so a 2 000 megahertz on instagram and you'll see the i have uh seven pictures that i posted on there uh unfortunately i i tried to post the one that lewis posts too but um instagram did something really wacky and like cut it sideways and flipped it and something so i had to delete that one out of the post but you get to see blackberry with her wide eyes staring at a at high high wondering what the hell this guy is oh no oh no oh no hi hi looks like belle delphine oh no oh that's terrible oh no ah we get a link uh i don't know if i can make a link let's see yes i can get a link to my instagram no i'm sorry about your brother's cat i love russian blues they're so pretty okay guys have a good day have a good weekend i won't be on tomorrow i'll come on next week probably the wire used today wasn't enameled i think it is uh it's just unbelievably small the stuff is so small that i don't think the enamel really matters i think the enamel just comes off so easily because it's .007 you can see it's sticking out to the side there it's smaller than a hair it's like the size of a really fine cat hair that you would find on something and it's really really really tiny but yeah the the it's because of how small it is the the the enamel has no effect on heat as soon as you touch it with a soldering iron it just the enamel just comes right off have a good day guys you

Channel: Louis Rossmann

Views: 23,521

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Id: LJJtVB9eQRo

Length: 120min 54sec (7254 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022