Vince's Repair Thread - (Console Repairs & Mods)

NutritioN said:
Yes mate! So does anything from my original GG still persist? :D
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I should have some pics of it all back together and cleaned up for you tomorrow or Friday. I will put it all in a new case for you so I don't have to snap parts of the original case unless you want me to? I was going to give you a second shell for it anyway so if you tell me what you want to do ill just do exactly that that. Should be back in town relatively early next week to hand it over. Here is a little vid of your board/screen/audio in my shell (because USB power) and pre cut shell/screen shims.


Game gears are stupid loud sound after a decent recap, they do an amp for them, totally unnecessary :cry: Ill get that right alignment perfect and move it over just a smidge before I transport it to your shell. won't lie the newer board feels a lot better on the buttons and I have no idea why. I have quite a lot of footage of the repair, not streamed so will put that up soon.
 
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teenwolf said:
how much you charge to replace a switch screen bud ?
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Screen and digitizer? Buy me the parts and ill do it for free/a beer :D. I'd replace the digitizer just because tbh, they are cheap and it will look like bran new if it's got some scratches. :D parts total on an LCD and Digitizer is about £35 ish.
 
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Another switch lite enters the fold...



Backlight circuit failure as is common - somebody has had the digitizer and screen out so this one should be interesting.

These screws aren't even from a switch :cry:

 
Bit of long screw damage, some issues with the backlight circuit and a clueless person taking it apart before... 30 mins later we have life.



Going to have to stop expecting switches to pose a challenge these days... need to find something harder :cry:

Edit: didn't even get to what was wrong with it... somebody snapped a load of the connectors board side so I replaced them all like this...





With ones from one of my donors.. seems to be about all, water damaged at some point in its life so swapped out some corroded ribbons and reflowed areas I could see were once effected. And that was about it. Reassembled using correct length and correct screws :o

Still waiting on second donor GG...
 
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Something a bit different - in all the repairing / swapping between devices I managed to break my ammeter, this is the second time ive broke the same ammeter in the same way. Last time because I didn't think I could fix it properly I bought a new one as they are only about £6 on ebay...

Broken Ammeter...



Its pulled itself off the pins but pins are still there.


Soldered back on.



Was focusing so much on the microscope I forgot to move the lcd out of the way and slightly burned the edge



It's working but I clearly still have a lot to learn.
 
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[Death] said:
looking sweet buddy, which screens are you using in them? i have my eye on 2 of them on the bay at mo :)
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They are mcwill clones from alix there is a working link some posts back if you search on for the term "Alix Link" you should find it :) Cant recommend an MLCC recap and these screens enough. They have all been really nice quality even if they are tricky to fit. Some kits now have all pre cut ribbon cables etc. One thing i like about the mcwill vs say the benvenn is that the lcd board handles brightness rather than needing the 35v rail as a reference rail like the former as it's fairly common to have 35v to 5v shorts on the board so if you take off all the 35v like you do when fitting these then you don't have to work out whats wrong with 35v and where.

I will say though whatever you do stay away from any hot air on these boards. I just dont think they are that robust a board, they are thin and flimsy and the vias are like 30 years old and waiting to go pop. Now ive technically done 5 fixed 3 broke 2 but still think another one might be salvageable do we think we should try and possibly fix another.
 
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NutritioN said:
Looks smashing. Yeah I'm in on Monday.

So what was the run down of what it took to get it to this state? Was my board just too fishy? :cry:
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Yea your board was indeed a bit too broken. I mean with a ton more time I could probably have worked out exactly what traces and vias were broken and found some replacement ASICS / SDRAM but at the end of the day if we have that much damage it starts getting to the point where you are throwing a lot of time at it and any number of things could be broken. I think my best bet might just be to write off my old board and your old board but im going to put yours back into "normal looking ish" condition with your shell on it so you can keep it as a ornament. it will never work again but why not have some fun.
 
The chips came for the unpatched switches dock. I guessed m92t55 was likely the issue so ordered that. Replaced it today and we have the whole thing now working:







Now I need it gone :D so have offered it in a wanted thread on here but otherwise it's going on ebay.
 
Started listing some consoles this weekend, got 3 switches online and think with the money I'm going to do another few game gears, I'm going to hunt down that illusive LYNX this month if I can as well. Once the caps get here I am going to make up some recap kits, retrosix kits are about £9 and I've got 20 kits in from china in individual caps so I'm going to grab a few more than I need and do a few cheaper kits. The game gear tantalum caps are rated 1uf 50v, 10uf 50v and 100uf 6.3v so ive got a couple of hundred of each on the way.

I think I am also going to list my GameBoy Colour as although I played it quite lot the parts for the Pocket and the Advance are in the country now and the advance is basically the end game for my little GameBoy collection. I also looked and a Colour like mine should make about £100 which is utter madness. Mind you I do have about £65/70 or so into it so I guess it's not that crazy.

The 3DS I also think has to go, bar testing I haven't picked it up once so I am thinking shift that, make a little bit and move on up to a newer 3DS model. Still waiting on the parts for the Vita but when they get here that should be a good one :D I went a bit nuts so can't wait to show the final product.

When I grabbed those extra game gears they both had power and audio boards, so to recoup some of my losses there im going to recap and sell the audio and power boards that should get me back what I lost or at least some of what I lost buying the donor GG's.

Things I am still waiting on from China

- 1 Clear Blue Switch Lite Chassis
- 2 sets of GameGear McWill Screens
- 20 Sets Of Game Gear Caps
- 10 Switch Charge Ports
- 10 B10K analogue replacements (the pots used in the pro controller) - This is still in pieces on my bench.
- IPS Kit for GBA
- IPS Kit for GameBoy Pocket
- PS2 Laser (last Chinese laser I bought set fire so this might be fun)
- Vita Charge Port
- Vita Replacement shell

Consoles/Ebay Stuff inbound

- Switch Lite Grey (Likely mashed charge port and other board damage) - £55 + Postage
- Switch Lite Coral (No Power) - £55 + Postage
- Lots of tubes of thermal paste
- The correct Charge port for our 3DS ready for us to sell it on (remember we mashed a "NEW" 3ds charge port into it)
- Electrolytic Cap Kits (Enough for 20 GG power boards)

So yea a waiting game more than anything. Looking forward to doing a couple of GG's to sell on as a little project I know it all went a bit wrong with the last one but I still enjoyed the challenge and want to make a few really nice ones to sell.
 
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[Death] said:
Holy hell Vince that’s a lot of purchases haha. List looks great tho , how much u normally sell the switches for ? Got a mate may be after one .

I’ve also been busy, ordered a Cr10s pro v2 3d printer , gonna try and design some custom cases and parts for older consoles.

got a sega game gear I have won with sound issues on route so that I need to look at.

no where near as busy of you but all good :)
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I recon I could sort your mate out a switch, what is he after and ill do you a good price on one. On ebay they normally run between £120 and £145 for a lite but in the real world id do a much better price without all the fees etc.

It is quite the list of stuff. Last night I sat and bagged up all my spare parts and labelled all the bags. Assembeled Nutritions second shell into a GG and boxed everything up. Happy with where his console is and where my GG is now so we need to fiddle with some other projects. Certain things seem to be pretty expensive here so I'm tending to buy some extras in to resell - Eventually it would be nice to have a solid flow of stuff through ebay as honestly ive sold probably 30 or more consoles on there now and not a single issue.

Ive also sold other parts such as the odd switch lite daughter board, fan, button set etc from donors. The key is to not let too much build up. Keep moving stuff along and keeping the awesome stuff and the stuff you really like.
 
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[Death] said:
move been pricing up and emailing the sellers on ali etc , looking into maybe setting up a uk supply of screens , cap kits etc etc. so fed up with waiting so long for supplies from china / usa


Would be a full size switch not a lite :)
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I was offering the full unpatched one to somebody on here for a very good price. Let me know and I can put one together :) There is 100% a need for more parts over here retrosix etc do a great job but man they are making some money on some of these kits.
 
Mensy said:
Is it easy to Solder ? My son has broken my harmony elite remote, so i opened it up and managed to fix it, but i musy have put one of the leads in the wrong way as i couldnt get it connected to i opened it up again and when ive taken the lead out the connector came off at the same time. My mam had a crappy soldering iton and ive tried to solder it back on but its still not working lol
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lets see some pics of the connector. Soldering in itself isn't hard but you do need flux and some idea what you are doing.
 
NutritioN said:
Depends, how does it smell?
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Unconfirmed at this point. wont smell fishy though. :cry: Got yours all boxed up and ready to go. Will bring it to London tomorrow. Stuck 6 batteries and sonic in my bag just in case you wanted to test it. Oh and look what I also bought:



An original yellow one.
 
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Handed over a GG to @NutritioN - Honestly dude I hope you have as much fun with it as I did repairing/modding it. Any issues at all you know exactly where to find me.

Nothing has arrived here today so another day without parts. Yellow switch sold is the only excitement today.

Expecting 3 switches and a GG this week.. I'm doing a little 2 GG vs 2 switch challenge.. 2 custom GG's and 2 one off switches... what makes the most cash? Will likely take a good month to know the outcome as that's how long parts from China take. The switches are a purple and blue clear with custom design thermal shields the GG's will be the yellow one and most likely a completely custom one where we replace the d pad with an analogue stick as well.
 
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NutritioN said:
Not sure I want all that fun you had. I'd like to think I'll be able to resurrect my 12 year muscle memory and 100% complete Sonic with all emeralds. See how long that takes me.
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Sonic on the GG is completely different to what I remember. There is like a forest level that doesn't exist on the mega drive version.
 
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