Junk Nintendo DS FULL Restoration

hey everyone how's it going elliott here and welcome to the retro future today i'm going to be doing a restoration to an original nintendo ds this one was bought from japan and as you can see it's in really terrible condition it was sold as faulty so let's see if we can get this thing working and give it a good clean up paint it up so it looks brand new and give it another life we'll start by checking why it doesn't work oh a battery might help there we go all i needed was a battery so now we can begin with the tear down now i didn't pay a lot for this thing i think it was under 10 now although this ds is in terrible condition it's only really sort of age related wear from someone who's just used their nintendo ds passionately every single day let's go ahead and remove all of the tri-wing screws this electric screwdriver will be linked in the description below you can see there the build-up of just lots of different things let's not think about it once we remove the back we can then have a look at the inside now the back is in really terrible condition the inside however although slightly dusty is in really great condition you can see on the left there the water indicator hasn't tripped lots more buildup of nasty stuff that we don't want to think about but to be honest this thing's coming up to 20 years old now so you can kind of expect that after removing all of these small phillips screws we're going to go ahead and undo the ribbon cables we need to be really really careful when using tweezers around these ribbon cables because one sort of slip could damage them permanently i'm using ceramic tipped tweezers again i'll link those in the description too they're really great for picking things up without risk of damage once we've unplugged all of those we need to remove the antenna wire and then we're pretty much free to lift the motherboard out after doing that we can flip it over and take a look at the underside which looks equally nice now let's go ahead and remove all of the rest of the things inside this shell the buttons are obviously a focus point of wear and also dirt and yeah it's really really nasty i genuinely left this in a bucket of hot soapy water for a day before starting to clean it up now we need to remove this ribbon cable which is held underneath a small piece of foam on the bottom screen so before we lift out that screen we need to remove this ribbon cable very gently after we've done that we can lift out the bottom screen which is really really badly damaged again just from sort of genuine use it's not being damaged by mistreatment it's just a stylus rubbing around on a screen for many many years now the screw covers have gone a horribly gloopy sort of mess one thing i found quite interesting about this is where the paint had worn off the plastic underneath had actually gone yellow which is kind of similar to you know when game boys and all that old tech goes yellow but it's just bizarre seeing the plastic only in that area underneath the worn paint go yellow and you'll see what i mean in a bit more now we need to pry apart this top piece of the shell you need to be really really delicate when doing this this plastic is not as strong as it was when it was first made one slight bit of pressure in the wrong area will send a split down that plastic so you need to be super careful you can see that apple sticker in the middle now this is going to be a really interesting thing to keep an eye out for that sticker will basically stop the plastic from going yellow and you'll see what i mean when we start sanding it down but i don't really understand the science of it it's certainly very interesting though now we can remove the ribbon cable and the antenna and go ahead and set this whole top assembly off to the side and then gently remove these speakers obviously we want every single component out of this ds before we start putting it in any water and spray painting so we're going to remove the old screen lens which was really scratched up and take out the hinges you need to make sure you do this when the hinge is open fully and there we have it everything laid out on the table i'm super excited to start working on this thing and putting it back together now we need to sand down the plastic it's really important that we do that before painting it otherwise all of the small scratches will show up underneath the layer of new paint so we need to give it a nice flat smooth surface to paint onto now you can see what i meant there by the yellowing on the plastic which has been exposed by scratches there's four pieces to paint don't forget that little hinge cover and we're going to be rubbing everything down first with some very fine grit wet and dry sandpaper now it really didn't take a lot to remove the paint obviously this thing must have just been rubbed around in someone's hands for a really long time because the paint almost fell off with a very small amount of pressure and you can see there what i mean about that apple symbol it stayed there until i painted it so whatever was going on with that it stopped the plastic from yellowing underneath some parts of the plastic were gray and other parts were yellow so it was quite hard to see where i had actually removed the old paint and we were down to the plastic underneath but generally speaking you don't need to necessarily remove all of the paint just need to make sure that everything is nice and smooth now after i finished sanding everything down with the wet and dry i gave it a really good thorough clean in the sink with some hot soapy water and then we were ready to paint now we're going to be priming this first i'm not a painting expert and i don't have a very sterile dust-free environment to paint in i just went outside and had to go the best i could possibly do from my knowledge and experience 30 centimeters away very small light bursts don't do anything too thick because you're going to be applying more layers so starting really thick is just pointless and start spraying before the can is over the subject that way you're not going to get any sort of pulls of paint from where you've pressed down the nozzle i hope that makes sense don't forget the little hinge cover then one more layer of primer this was about half an hour later after the first one and then we're gonna have a really nice surface to work with again you can see there just how lightly i'm spraying this on and although it looks really close it's about 30 centimeters away and that's the final result of the primer after two i think possibly three coats of it now we're gonna move on to the silver spray paint and there we have it a day later the final article looks fantastic there are very fine specks underneath some of the paint where dust had fallen from outside but you can't expect it to be perfect you can see the crack underneath there that wasn't actually structural it's just surface little split but just wanted to show you that so that you know it's still the same ds now we're going to give everything one final clean with some isopropyl alcohol before putting it back in there's no point putting dirty components into a brand spanking new shell i'll rub down the little metal feet as well to make sure that they make a really nice contact drop in the screen and screw down the small little pcbs either side don't forget that little spacer as well for some reason nintendo must have made the shell the wrong size then we're going to feed the ribbon cable very carefully through the hinge clean up the small hinges and pop them into place remember to do that again whilst the shell is open that way the hinge will close with a nice snap to it don't forget the little hinge piece then we can screw that down and then give every single button a really thorough clean with some isopropyl alcohol now cleaning all the buttons is a really therapeutic part and it's possibly one of my favorite parts because it's a really intricate gentle process and it's a great way to zone out from everyday stress then i'm going to go ahead and drop all of the small buttons back into place they can only go into their respective places as they have small notches cut out to ensure they're going into the right hole don't forget the small little light tube too it's an easy one to forget now we're going to put the springs back onto the trigger buttons and pop them back into the shell then we can clean up the rather dusty dirty motherboard with a toothbrush very gently and some isopropyl alcohol be very gentle there with a microphone drop in a bit of isopropyl alcohol into any switches as well so that you can give them a really nice contact i'm going to do that with the l r buttons 2. some people will dismantle those but i don't really feel that's necessary in this instance now i bought another screen on ebay which is going to be slightly controversial because now i'm using different parts but all the other one needed was just a replacement digitizer it's just they were more expensive than just buying an official replacement screen which had been taken out of another ds so i just decided to go with that we can go ahead and reset all of the ribbon cables again be really really careful whilst doing this i'm using my metal tweezers this time which i know is not a good idea but i've done this quite a few times go ahead and very gently set them in close down the latch and reconnect the antenna wire then we're going to go ahead and put the three screws back in and there's actually one underneath the cartridge slot which i forgot to do until a little bit later now the back of this shell was in really bad condition i could have scrubbed it up with a magic eraser but again i found this piece on ebay for really cheap which had come off of an official ds in much better condition and i don't really want to paint that because the original ones aren't painted it's just the black matte plastic so it's going to make it look far better if we just use this one but again the other one is completely recoverable then we can go ahead and set all of the screws back in put in the battery and see if it still works result a few things to do now just to finish it off we're going to give the battery cover one last little scrub before putting that down and screwing it in and then we need to reinstall the top panel of the nintendo ds and screw that down again be super careful when reinstalling this one slight bit of too much pressure and that's going to ruin everything now the four screws can go back in followed by the small rubber covers and this is the finished article i am super pleased with how this has turned out hopefully you can see by some of the small little dings here and the little crack that we saw there earlier that this is still the exact same nintendo ds that i have completely refurbished overall i think it's come out looking pretty much brand new obviously when you look up close there's a few small specks of dust underneath the paint but without super professional working environments it's really hard to get a professional finish but yeah i think overall it looks really cool managed to find a stylus i had kicking about to go in there as well when we open it up you can see that i have loaded in a game and everything works perfectly obviously there's much more modern devices to play on than the nintendo ds but if you're looking for that little kick of nostalgia there's something very special about just playing a nintendo ds the graphics were never meant to be the best but the games were just going to be super fun and i think they uh they achieved that result very well i think the uh the original ds design is actually quite underrated i know the ds lite was miles ahead in terms of how modern it looks but this really is a device of the time i think it came out in 2004 and uh yeah i think it's quite special so there we go gameboy cartridges running absolutely perfectly i really hope you've all enjoyed this video if you did please consider subscribing i know it's a very different one to the ones that i normally do so hopefully you enjoy it i know some people just want to see a more in-depth calm no music thorough video and hopefully that's going to be helpful to some of those people who are looking for that follow along please have a go at doing this yourself i'm not an expert and i do believe that everybody is capable of achieving a result similar to this one thank you very much for watching let me know in the comment section down below what you think and i'll catch you all in the next one bye

Channel: The Retro Future

Views: 485,060

Keywords: TheRetroFuture, RetroFuture, The Retro Future, Gameboy, Nintendo, Famicom, NES, SNES, Super, Repair, Fix, Restore, Collection, Japanese, Switch, MrBeast GameBoy, Elliot Coll, Retro Tech, DS, DSI, 3DS, Wii, Fake, Handheld, Console, Nintendo DS, Restoration

Id: u_0baVdxgmo

Length: 16min 55sec (1015 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 02 2022