So an update I guess is in order. Sorry it's been so long, other things have seriously got in the way this year. I'll be glad when next year comes around but ill never forget 2022 that's for sure. So what have I been up to? Well, my office got a bit too messy and hectic and I was finding it pretty hard with stuff all over the place so I decided to change it up a bit, I brought my wifes desk up next to mine, removed the shelving that used to house the queue and consoles and went out and bought a load of different nicer shelving to try and bring some organisation back to my life. I replaced most of my hobby setup since you last saw it so thought what better way to get back into it than show you a few pics....
Lets start off with my gaming/repair space as it stands at the moment, that's my lynx that's been playing up, I got a power circuit repair kit for it but it's still playing up... When I replaced all the circuit it worked great for about 3 or 4 mins then it randomly died again before I even had it back together so more troubleshooting required here. I mean it works absolutely fine if I bridge the mosfet and bypass the on/off state circuit but something is acting up in this area.
This is the shelving I bought then I wired up a load of led lights into two of the shelves but think the bottom shelf needs it as well so ill have to do that. It's just sort of a mish mash of consoles and lego at the moment:
The queue, which depresses me every time I look at it as some of it has defeated me multiple times over, some of it ive put so many hours into only for it to go back on the shelf while my little brain tries to process why I can't work out what is wrong with them
One of them, the 3080 I just can't work out im totally on the fence if it can be fixed but sadly I have to concede that it will need to go to somebody better than me at this repair business to fix it so ive contacted its owner and it's going back home so sorry about that dude. The other two, the 1080 thats just a total no go that card imo and its way beyond economical repair, I do know that most of the memory chips on it are shorted which to be honest is sad as the whole memory area is just one big short.
@Tinders 1070 however I am totally sure it can be fixed and i've spent hours on end trying to work it out and I bet one day I will but one day isn't really what you want to hear when you send something to somebody so if at any point anybody wants anything I have sitting on my shelf back please do shout. I'd bet money its just a dodgey resistor or something really simple on that 1070 but so far I haven't worked it out. Anyway the queue, there are about 4 switch oled's up the top in various states of repair, a ps4 and some other stuff:
To understand the picture after this one first you must understand that sometimes you fix something, it works 100% fine but you still aren't entirely comfortable selling it because of the lengths somebody would have to go to if it ever broke again, take this switch board for example, every pin on the charge port was destroyed by some ham fisted goon, so what you see there is a repair patch panel, it creates all new traces for you to attach the charge port to, however this is a one time use sort of patch tbh and if you ever damage that port again the lengths somebody would have to go to to replace it put this well outside of what would be considered economical repair so I can't in good concience sell this board on without somebody fully understanding what they are getting themselves into.
So these are my switch donor/working but too much work done collection, excluding my oled's and that one you see in the image behind....
People send me a lot of switches and id say my success rate on switches for repair within about an hour is really good, A lot of these are ones that were seriously water damaged and just aren't worth repairing, blue screen switches/ones where you plug them in and the apu goes to about 250 degrees, or ones where somebody has just massacred them before they got to me account for probably 90% of these boards.
I got these plastic draw things... in here we have about 30 switches/switch lites. I estimate i've fixed hundreds of switches now, some weeks I see more switches than there are days in the week. I did one for a fella in the nintendo switch thread who was asking about repair. Cant remember the fellas name now. Anyway draws of repair fixing things and many, many switches and switch spares.
Game gears, I still sell a huge number of recapped GG boards on ebay... I managed to pick up 200 faulty sound boards early in the year for £1.40 a unit. I repair them with mlcc's normally but sometimes I like to mix it up and do some with orignial spec caps but i sell them for £9.99 and I can probably fix 20 or so of them in an hour and find it super relaxing as I basically have a schematic for the GG sound board in my head now.
Other than that through the discord and my ebay shop ive picked up random collectors that keep sending me random consoles from their collections to be worked on and modded so I did two game gear builds for a fella just before christmas, one just a recap and repair on an original screen game gear, and the other a full mod. I have a full GG mod down to about 40 mins now. a recap about 15/20 mins. Current projects are pretty spread but what with work and everything time is limited.
Projects im working on include, Ive just recieved a hwfly for my oled so that needs installing (to help troubleshoot the other oleds that came to me) - Long story but I keep getting people send me oleds where they have failed at installing the mod chip and have bricked their consoles, 2 of 4 oleds on the shelf are dead in this way. Thats a £400 ish mistake right there...
Ive babbled on a load here so if you are still reading I appreciate that
Anyway let me show you some more things:
This is a full xstation/xreset/hdmi mod I did to a ps1 for my mates other halves mum of all people:
I bought a faulty switch off of somebody and they sent me a free 3ds in parts:
One dodgy Chinese repro shell plus a few cheap ebay connectors etc and a little bit of board rework and it lives:
I mean I guess ive been spending a lot less time but the more I do the better at it I get and the more I learn, eventually I am fairly sure almost anything is fixable if you have the time/funds etc to do it and some idea of how it might work. But sometimes you go to extraordinary lengths to try and save somebodies saves which you will mostly find is something like animal crossing and you end up going to these kinds of lenghts:
You will notice the entire cpu voltage regulation circuit plus the cpu was off of the board, 99.9% of the time you should just throw this one on the donor pile and move on but that 1 in 100 where the heart rules the head, on this one I ended up replacing an absurd amount of the components and no it wasn't worth it but it was kinda fun to do and by doing stuff like this you really learn how the thing works.
