First things first, happy new year. Second things first, my repair hobby.
I've been scrounging for video game consoles at the thrift stores for years, I remember my first score being a PS2 slim that I assembled with the available wires for 22 dollars. It has to have been responsible for me getting into 19/2000's consoles for the reason being that I can get more games for dirt cheap if I'm willing to get into their innards. Recently my biggest score is getting a complete Xbox console set for 11 dollars, and all I needed to fix it was to replace a worn out rubber band. I don't exactly have expertise, but that's what training and experimenting is about. I got the antistatic wristband and mask to prevent my cranium from the lead air from soldering. Ok I hold my breath when I solder but I still try to keep it at zero.
My score for repairing stuff to life is 1 X360 (laser) and two OG xboxes (disk tray rubber band). My casualties would be a gamecube (laser calibration), two X360s (Caps & solder screwup), a pocket TV (decayed circuitry), and currently one PS3 controller with just a bad dpad input. The two looming dreads in those projects were either impatience or the potential money investment to repair them.
The sole reason I manage to get the things I fix fixed is the absolute crutching I look at the ifixit website. It's why I could actually use the flip cameras I got, it's how I could snap open a controller to clean the years worth of gunk out, and it made me learn what part I missed or didn't gleam before the magic smoke escaped. In case you couldn't tell, I'm frustrated at ordering a new flex ribbon for one of my ps3 controllers. It's dirt simple to remember that the items I am looking for is A) potentially E-Waste, and B) old enough to graduate high school at this point, but I forget. Silver lining is that at least I blew around 30~ dollars for a project instead of getting a 499$ console to transform into a funny little paperweight.
Not all of my experience is following directions, I managed to disassemble a VHS-C camcorder and discover the problem, which was the rotatable viewfinder wasn't working because the ribbon was sawn in half. Took it to a camera place, got it returned because there wasn't a guide for disassembly. Maybe it was a 'No screwing with other peoples things' rule. Charting into unknown territory is definitely risky and time consuming, but there was so much relief to know that it wasn't just the camcorder just combusting out of old age. It also gives me a chance to sate my curiosity of how a thing worked when it has long since expired. Pop open a console, compare and contrast, and you could make a comparison of how some things back then just had the same guts in a different shell.
Some of the more fun things when repairing is getting to see some of the manufacturer stuff or assembly that you weren't supposed to see, but have some fun in it. Take the switch PCB message for example. One of the wackier stuff is cracking open an OG Xbox and getting wicked scared at all the white stuff coated around the copper coils and caps. I thought it was like the mother of all cap pops that somehow got mold on it over the years, but after doing my search (Which 9/10 times gets me a reddit forum) it was just a bunch of glue. Given that the one was a 2004 model, I could only think how microsoft talked with the manufacturers on that one.
"Alright, we got some feedback from customers, it appears that we need the caps to be more stable. Any suggestions?"
'stick to one capacitor supplier'
"We tried sticking more, it got too big, what do we have right now?"
'Well, we have a massive amount of stabilizing expoy from connecting the copper coils together'
"Alright, since we are microsoft and we could sink a cargo ship's worth of GPUs in order to get into the console market, just let the workers go to town on that epoxy. Like, fill a cup with it and have them tip the cup over where the coils is. That should cut some of our repair traffic a bit. How's our demand in the Asian market?"
From my owners guide from my ifixit toolset, magnets are your friend. Trust me, searching the carpet for tiny little screws is not a fun way to pass the time, it's also not a fun way to exercise your back either. You will manage to spill a piece on accident, so there's nothing slick to your finger dexterity.
