Awesome series. I do a lot of Xbox repairs and yes the board is a pita. I finally broke down and bought a hako desoldering gun. It's an absolute game changer.
Man, I look forward to these every month. And I'm almost in the same boat with the amount of things sitting around that i need to fix. Keep it up this is great.
Thank you! I'm not going to lie, it has been a push to get some of these items fixed but knowing people look forward to seeing the results has been one of my big motivators lately. Thanks for watching! There will be more to come!
ive done a few motherboard recaps and based on what ive seen others do ive settled on this. 1. i wiggle them out like you are. I am using more of a chisel tip so that will transfer hear better than the pointy cone tip. 2. I was only using a zd-915 solder gun and after i had the same problem you have on ground plane. I bought a hot air station (X-Tronic 6020-PRO-X). Blowing the air and then sucking out with the gun works great. But thats your problem is that ground plane sinks all of the heat from your solder station and the solder isnt molten. If you have a regular heat gun that could work too to get the area warmer. For the corrosion scraping ive seen other use a diamond etching pen with good results. Im planning to try one on a 286 board with corroding traces. I also bought a mag wire kit so also good to see you had good results with that.
Great series! Love the content. You have been doing console repairs for long? Edit: for cleaning up the holes from the caps I just add a little low melt solder in combination with solder sucker makes easy work (especially if you don’t have a hot air gun available)
Thanks, great to hear! I've been tinkering with stuff for years. I suppose I could say I've been fixing stuff for over 10+ years but it was mostly tinkering early on. In the last 5ish years I've been more interested in the how's and why of fixes and more serious about refurbishing items though.
Removing the solder from the capacitor holes cut A piece of wick hold with a needle nose And hot air To wake up the solder holes Also use hot air with my desoldering gun hot air helps a lot
Thanks for the info! I don't have a hot air station but I've been thinking about getting one for some time and never knew if it was more of a preference thing with use or more of another tool to use in certain situations like this. I've never ran into a situation until now where I've really wondered about using it though.
@@gamejaeger yeah you can check out a station I reviewed that gets less than like $300 called Web-Tools hot air station 🚉 I was impressed with it. I did a review video check it out.
I'm still not sold on the fiberglass pens but I don't feel I've given them a fair shake yet either. I'm going to keep using them for a while and really see. The one thing I noticed is they get very dirty after a while too. Do you cut the tip after a while? Or just wipe it on something else to remove the dirt/ debris? Like I said, haven't used them much yet but I'm sure I'll figure it out.
Definitely need a chisel tip to transfer more heat faster than the pointed cone tip can. I've done dozens of og xbox repairs and the chisel tip and wiggle method work wonders. Also, ive made a few posts on reddit about the resistor arrays on the dvd drives going out of spec. Had a few that wouldnt read discs or some that would read games as audio CDs, after bodging my own resistors in series from point to pin on the bottom it fixed a few of them.
Interesting, did you try it on multiple drives (as in different manufacturers)? And where the results the same each time? I bet that was no easy task either...
To remove the solder from the holes i stand the board up, heat bottom side with iron, and suck from top side with sucker...i use chisel tip also for that
I have similar struggles with removing the main board capacitors, the wiggle method and switching to a chisel tip are what I do now as I haven't found a better way. I'm waiting on Thomson recap kits myself I have 2 that are in need, this will be my first attempt at recapping DVD drives hope this is going to work as it will be a game changer.
Thank you, I've seen multiple recommendation for the chisel tip and I'll for sure have to try it out. If you have any experience recapping stuff, the kits I just picked up for the Thomson were pretty easy to install. It was just a bit fiddly taking everything apart. I give an update in the next video too.
@gamejaeger I just bought the kits from Console5 for the Thomson drive because I couldn't be bothered to look for them separately. Should be here this week as I placed my order Thursday.
Edit to your Soldering issues. Your tip is veeeery small. Xbox Mainboards need a lot if thermal transfer for the throughhole stuff. I use a huge tipp to remove the caps, works well 80-90% of the time (:
I've just done some Xbox 360 xenon motherboards for capacitor replacements and noticed it was pretty hard for the legs and pads to take the new leaded solder, I guess the legs and capacitors themselves take in so much heat it just stops it joining
Random question but how do you find these things at a good price? I want to fix things as well, mostly for my own collection not necessarily to resell, but I often find things that are either, only cosmetically damaged which, you know *ok, fine,* irreparable, or straight up fake. How do you find these listings with things that are broken but repairable? I know "used for parts" is usually how but it seems really rare I actually find something like that. Maybe im just seeing "not working" at a very very slight discount ($5-10 off usually) as not worth it?
It really just depends on the item honestly. If you are looking for Pokemon GBC carts that are broken, good luck. You'll be paying market price or maybe even higher for them all day long. Now Sega Game Gears? They aren't as popular so you have some negotiation power on price, sometimes... It turns into a numbers game after a while though too. If you look at 1000 listings a day, everyday, you'll find some hidden gems eventually. But you're right, a vast majority of stuff listed online is trying to be sold at market pricing which really isn't worth it IMO. It is rare to find an abundance of items so it really comes down to how much time do you want to spend looking.
No problem, sorry for being slightly vague. It just all depends on where you plan on getting items from and of course demand is a huge part of it most of the time.
You don't need the baking soda. Baking soda is a base and will consume all the acetic acid in the vinegar. Creating water, sodium acetate (a salt) and carbon dioxide, which is not good, since the salt won't really do anything. You want the acetic acid to react with the iron oxide, which is a much slower process.
@@gamejaeger yes they are. Thomson are the most failure prone drives of the og Xbox so usually makes no sense to refurbish them on my experience. I am interested in seeing if the recap fix works. While some have reported it to work it usually doesn’t .
I already did 3 of them but sorry you'll have to wait until next month for the results... :) But on another note, if you don't refurbish them, do you swap in other drives at that point? Or do you have a stockpile of Samsung drives that no one knows about? lol
@@gamejaegerunlike later generation Xboxs parts don’t exist to repair them so I mod them so that there’s no longer a need for them. Phillips have been the most reliable in my personal experience not Samsungs. Many times it’s the resistors as well that go bad and it’s just worth the trouble
Gotcha, that makes sense. I always forget there's a huge mod scene for the OG Xbox. I haven't looked into it yet myself but that may be something I do with a few of the leftover consoles I have if I can't get the drives running. We shall see...
You know, I do have to ask: You seem to repair a lot of original Xboxes, How often do you encounter an original xbox with a dead disk drive laser? Almost every Original Xbox I've seen appears to have a dead laser ☹
Its funny you ask, I saw so many posts online talking about Pot adjustments and how their laser is dying and I haven't seen one yet. I was seriously considering pre-purchasing drive lasers because of the prevalence of those posts and I assumed I would have a boatload of them myself. I haven't seen a single one yet. I still have several Xbox units to go through so I'm bound to find at least one I would imagine but nothing yet oddly enough.
@@gamejaeger Someones really gotta get to selling 3rd party disk laser replacements for the OG Xbox. PS1/2, Gamecube, and Dreamcast all have 3rd party replacement lasers and the xbox doesn’t. It’s unfortunate.
I've seen a few versions available online but not for all manufacturers. I honestly haven't done a deep dive with it either so maybe they all do exist somewhere and I'm just not seeing them yet.
On the Xbox units? No, I did not. I did do some research on it though and what I found out is unless the unit was having issues like overheating or you're trying to push performance boundaries like adding additional RAM, overclocking, stuff like that, it doesn't seem necessary. People do seem pretty opinionated about it though. And I'm sure it's still not a bad upgrade to do if you want to make sure you're console will last for years to come but, everything I read came to the conclusion that it wasn't super necessary.
Awesome series. I do a lot of Xbox repairs and yes the board is a pita. I finally broke down and bought a hako desoldering gun. It's an absolute game changer.
Good to know it's not just me having issues lol. Thanks for the tip though, I may look into some additional tools...
Man, I look forward to these every month. And I'm almost in the same boat with the amount of things sitting around that i need to fix. Keep it up this is great.
Thank you! I'm not going to lie, it has been a push to get some of these items fixed but knowing people look forward to seeing the results has been one of my big motivators lately. Thanks for watching! There will be more to come!
After getting the Hakko Fr-301 I no longer experience the desoldering pain. Definitely recommend! Amazing videos as always. Keep it up!
Thanks! I may end up looking into one of those eventually or at least something similar to start with and try out. They can get pretty expensive.
ive done a few motherboard recaps and based on what ive seen others do ive settled on this. 1. i wiggle them out like you are. I am using more of a chisel tip so that will transfer hear better than the pointy cone tip. 2. I was only using a zd-915 solder gun and after i had the same problem you have on ground plane. I bought a hot air station (X-Tronic 6020-PRO-X). Blowing the air and then sucking out with the gun works great. But thats your problem is that ground plane sinks all of the heat from your solder station and the solder isnt molten. If you have a regular heat gun that could work too to get the area warmer.
For the corrosion scraping ive seen other use a diamond etching pen with good results. Im planning to try one on a 286 board with corroding traces.
I also bought a mag wire kit so also good to see you had good results with that.
Nice! Thanks for the info! I'll have to look and see if I have a chisel tip for my iron stashed somewhere and test that out too.
I'm loving this series. Keep up the great content!
Thanks, will do!
Love this series, congrats on the 1k subs! Your channel has been growing really fast, you will be at 5k in no time. Keep it up!
Thank you! I hope so!
Great series! Love the content. You have been doing console repairs for long? Edit: for cleaning up the holes from the caps I just add a little low melt solder in combination with solder sucker makes easy work (especially if you don’t have a hot air gun available)
Thanks, great to hear! I've been tinkering with stuff for years. I suppose I could say I've been fixing stuff for over 10+ years but it was mostly tinkering early on. In the last 5ish years I've been more interested in the how's and why of fixes and more serious about refurbishing items though.
the bad caps on the disc drive seem just like the same issue with the gamecube drives as well, nice find i will have to try this out some time
I was shocked the hot air worked to test it though, but it makes perfect sense...
Removing the solder from the capacitor holes cut A piece of wick hold with a needle nose And hot air To wake up the solder holes Also use hot air with my desoldering gun hot air helps a lot
Thanks for the info! I don't have a hot air station but I've been thinking about getting one for some time and never knew if it was more of a preference thing with use or more of another tool to use in certain situations like this. I've never ran into a situation until now where I've really wondered about using it though.
@@gamejaeger yeah you can check out a station I reviewed that gets less than like $300 called Web-Tools hot air station 🚉 I was impressed with it. I did a review video check it out.
Will do!
Nice u got some glassfiber pens👍🏼 Get yourself a desolder gun, much better than the manual ones. And maybe use kester 40/60 rosin core leaded solder.
I'm still not sold on the fiberglass pens but I don't feel I've given them a fair shake yet either. I'm going to keep using them for a while and really see. The one thing I noticed is they get very dirty after a while too. Do you cut the tip after a while? Or just wipe it on something else to remove the dirt/ debris? Like I said, haven't used them much yet but I'm sure I'll figure it out.
Definitely need a chisel tip to transfer more heat faster than the pointed cone tip can. I've done dozens of og xbox repairs and the chisel tip and wiggle method work wonders.
Also, ive made a few posts on reddit about the resistor arrays on the dvd drives going out of spec. Had a few that wouldnt read discs or some that would read games as audio CDs, after bodging my own resistors in series from point to pin on the bottom it fixed a few of them.
Interesting, did you try it on multiple drives (as in different manufacturers)? And where the results the same each time? I bet that was no easy task either...
To remove the solder from the holes i stand the board up, heat bottom side with iron, and suck from top side with sucker...i use chisel tip also for that
Thanks for the tip!
I have similar struggles with removing the main board capacitors, the wiggle method and switching to a chisel tip are what I do now as I haven't found a better way. I'm waiting on Thomson recap kits myself I have 2 that are in need, this will be my first attempt at recapping DVD drives hope this is going to work as it will be a game changer.
Thank you, I've seen multiple recommendation for the chisel tip and I'll for sure have to try it out. If you have any experience recapping stuff, the kits I just picked up for the Thomson were pretty easy to install. It was just a bit fiddly taking everything apart. I give an update in the next video too.
@gamejaeger I just bought the kits from Console5 for the Thomson drive because I couldn't be bothered to look for them separately. Should be here this week as I placed my order Thursday.
Those are the ones I used too. All I can say is they installed easily, I'll show the results next month though.
@@gamejaeger Very Cool
Thanks!
Edit to your Soldering issues. Your tip is veeeery small. Xbox Mainboards need a lot if thermal transfer for the throughhole stuff. I use a huge tipp to remove the caps, works well 80-90% of the time (:
Awesome, I will try that because it's driving me nuts currently lol
I've just done some Xbox 360 xenon motherboards for capacitor replacements and noticed it was pretty hard for the legs and pads to take the new leaded solder, I guess the legs and capacitors themselves take in so much heat it just stops it joining
Very good to know I'm not the only one with these issues.
Random question but how do you find these things at a good price?
I want to fix things as well, mostly for my own collection not necessarily to resell, but I often find things that are either, only cosmetically damaged which, you know *ok, fine,* irreparable, or straight up fake.
How do you find these listings with things that are broken but repairable? I know "used for parts" is usually how but it seems really rare I actually find something like that.
Maybe im just seeing "not working" at a very very slight discount ($5-10 off usually) as not worth it?
It really just depends on the item honestly. If you are looking for Pokemon GBC carts that are broken, good luck. You'll be paying market price or maybe even higher for them all day long. Now Sega Game Gears? They aren't as popular so you have some negotiation power on price, sometimes...
It turns into a numbers game after a while though too. If you look at 1000 listings a day, everyday, you'll find some hidden gems eventually. But you're right, a vast majority of stuff listed online is trying to be sold at market pricing which really isn't worth it IMO. It is rare to find an abundance of items so it really comes down to how much time do you want to spend looking.
@@gamejaeger interesting. Thank you for letting me know!
No problem, sorry for being slightly vague. It just all depends on where you plan on getting items from and of course demand is a huge part of it most of the time.
You don't need the baking soda. Baking soda is a base and will consume all the acetic acid in the vinegar. Creating water, sodium acetate (a salt) and carbon dioxide, which is not good, since the salt won't really do anything. You want the acetic acid to react with the iron oxide, which is a much slower process.
So just use plain vinegar instead?
@@gamejaeger Yes.
Gotcha, how long does that normally take to work for you? With light corrosion vs heavy?
@@gamejaeger It's a pretty slow process. Could be several minutes to hours.
Thanks for the info! I will have to try it out.
Console5 sells the belts for the Thomson drive
I saw that after I bought the big pack and they seem like one of the only places online to sell them too.
@@gamejaeger yes they are. Thomson are the most failure prone drives of the og Xbox so usually makes no sense to refurbish them on my experience. I am interested in seeing if the recap fix works. While some have reported it to work it usually doesn’t .
I already did 3 of them but sorry you'll have to wait until next month for the results... :)
But on another note, if you don't refurbish them, do you swap in other drives at that point? Or do you have a stockpile of Samsung drives that no one knows about? lol
@@gamejaegerunlike later generation Xboxs parts don’t exist to repair them so I mod them so that there’s no longer a need for them. Phillips have been the most reliable in my personal experience not Samsungs. Many times it’s the resistors as well that go bad and it’s just worth the trouble
Gotcha, that makes sense. I always forget there's a huge mod scene for the OG Xbox. I haven't looked into it yet myself but that may be something I do with a few of the leftover consoles I have if I can't get the drives running. We shall see...
Xbox Thomson Drives need 55m Bands (: I Order mine from Aliexpress, but they are also not that cheap :D
sure, you tell anyway xD
I do lol
You know, I do have to ask: You seem to repair a lot of original Xboxes, How often do you encounter an original xbox with a dead disk drive laser?
Almost every Original Xbox I've seen appears to have a dead laser ☹
Its funny you ask, I saw so many posts online talking about Pot adjustments and how their laser is dying and I haven't seen one yet. I was seriously considering pre-purchasing drive lasers because of the prevalence of those posts and I assumed I would have a boatload of them myself. I haven't seen a single one yet. I still have several Xbox units to go through so I'm bound to find at least one I would imagine but nothing yet oddly enough.
@@gamejaeger Someones really gotta get to selling 3rd party disk laser replacements for the OG Xbox. PS1/2, Gamecube, and Dreamcast all have 3rd party replacement lasers and the xbox doesn’t. It’s unfortunate.
I've seen a few versions available online but not for all manufacturers. I honestly haven't done a deep dive with it either so maybe they all do exist somewhere and I'm just not seeing them yet.
Did you replace the thermal paste ?
On the Xbox units? No, I did not.
I did do some research on it though and what I found out is unless the unit was having issues like overheating or you're trying to push performance boundaries like adding additional RAM, overclocking, stuff like that, it doesn't seem necessary.
People do seem pretty opinionated about it though. And I'm sure it's still not a bad upgrade to do if you want to make sure you're console will last for years to come but, everything I read came to the conclusion that it wasn't super necessary.
Instaclicked. Makes my day every time :)
Your comment just made mine, thank you!