Hi,

My ribbon suffered the standard glue problem, and the oven trick failed, so I tried soldering.

Turns out I’m pretty terrible at that. It looks like the ribbon is beyond repair. So I’m now wondering if I have any alternatives?

Thanks for any help.

Could you post a good-quality picture of it? It may still be salvageable, taking off extra solder and re-aligning pins could be all it takes to fix your cable. Unfortunately unless you solder individual wires to replace the ribbon, there really isn’t an alternative out there…

I did see someone replace the ribbon cable with really thin wires, 1 x 1… it’ll take a long time but you can recover from it. Post a picture to see how bad it actually is.

i can possibly save depending on damage or i can replace it if you want

I bet it’s salvageable. I’ve rescued some pretty bad jobs.

Yeah over on either of the facebook virtual boy spaces there’s a guy named Chris Snead who has more than once successfully replaced a ribbon cable outright using thin wires for each of the connections. It looks like red clown hair gone bad, but it works fantastic.

Finally!

A thread where I can showcase my soldering skills 😀

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Just step away.

Step away from the soldering iron, sir!

NOPE NOPE NOPE

vuefinder83 wrote:
Finally!

A thread where I can showcase my soldering skills 😀

woah… yeah thats pretty bad alright. tbh im not sure if the screen wasn’t damage from too much heat. or a damaged trace.

Looks more like welding than soldering at this point, lol

Tried the ‘flame thrower’ approach on that one, eh…

Looks like you used a standard soldering iron and solder found in a hardware store. Usually on those you can’t control the heat and they come with giant tips. Those are used to solder much bigger items than electronics.

If you want to learn to solder on electronics, you can. There are great online resources available, but soldering is one of those things where having the right equipment for the job makes so much of a difference.

speedyink wrote:
Just step away.

Step away from the soldering iron, sir!

Yeah but… but…

Ok 🙁

Nes Freak wrote:

woah… yeah thats pretty bad alright. tbh im not sure if the screen wasn’t damage from too much heat. or a damaged trace.

I’m not sure either, but I do know that I burned my finger pretty badly on the clear plastic that protects the LEDs, so that’s damaged (as can be seen in the picture below).

ArcadeDanger wrote:
Tried the ‘flame thrower’ approach on that one, eh…

XD

Nah… Proton Pack 😉

brumbie13 wrote:

If you want to learn to solder on electronics, you can. There are great online resources available, but soldering is one of those things where having the right equipment for the job makes so much of a difference.

Thanks but soldering is definitely not for me. This was actually something that I did almost 10 years ago when I had first heard of the solder fix. I watched a quick tutorial video on YouTube and the guy made it look so easy, and that’s what made me decide to give it a go.

It was actually the first and last time I ever tried soldering anything.

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I commend you for at least trying!

I must have turned notifications off or something, I thought no one had answered.

I will upload my disaster at some point shortly.

I’ve seen threads about alternate cables being available, but expensive, and I’m particularly interested in the idea of soldering lots of little cables. Is there a guide for that plan anywhere?

How do you practice this stuff?!