A retired TV repairman in Omaha told me to always check the solder joints before swapping boards

I was chasing a power issue on a 15 year old Samsung LCD and was about to order a new power supply board. He walked me through it and we found a cracked joint on a relay pin that I would have missed. Has anyone else gotten good mileage from resoldering instead of replacing whole assemblies?

3 comments

3 Comments

robin62827d agoMost Upvoted

Yeah I get where that old timer is coming from but honestly that advice is getting a bit dated. Modern boards are so compact and multilayer that you're more likely to lift a pad or bridge something tiny than actually fix the problem. I tried that on a Samsung power board a few years back, spent two hours with a magnifying glass and ended up making it worse. Ended up buying a $30 replacement board anyway and it just worked. For older gear with big through-hole components maybe, but with the really thin surface mount stuff it's a gamble.

davis.noah27d ago

Come on, that $30 board was probably built with the cheapest components that'll crap out in another year, whereas fixing that original Samsung board is way more reliable in the long run. A little patience and a decent iron is all it takes, and you avoid contributing to all that e-waste from tossing a board that just needed a single cap or resistor replaced. Yeah it's a pain with tiny parts, but that's half the fun of learning how to actually troubleshoot instead of just swapping parts.

ruby_jones26d ago

Fair point but learning to fix stuff still beats tossing it every time.

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