How are all the people so confident in doing stuff like this?
I tried to read the hardmod guide, and the beginning, there was a HUGE red warning that reads:
SERIOUSLY, if you've NEVER soldered before, this is not the mod for you to attempt yourself. The photos that you've seen to make you so confident you can do this yourself? They're usually in the ballpark of 10-20 times zoom. Most of the things you are seeing on this scale are millimeter or smaller in measurement. This mod requires good lighting, steady hands, all the right equipment, and most of all, experience with soldering. Knowledge of why flux works, and why it is so important to be used in small projects like this cannot be overstated. Please, don't kill your switch, this isn't r/techgore, we don't want to see photos of your ripped traces and your tears stained on the motherboard...
This warning would be completely enough to kill any confidence that I would've had if I ever attempted to do the hardmod.
That, and the list of required stuff is quite long and lists a lot of VERY, VERY specific stuff that can be hard or plain impossible to obtain depending on your country. At least the resistors that it lists are at a somewhat common value (50Ω) and aren't very specific, but when it gets to stuff like the soldering tips or even the wire, it's one very specific product and considering how many types of copper wires or tips exist...
The way to gain confidence, is to start with something older. For example, RGH mod a xbox 360 (medium difficulty) or PicoBoot mod a GameCube (low difficulty), repair some older electronics with a known fault (like bad capacitors) or just get some scrap electronics to practice desoldering and soldering components on, like an old PC motherboard.
You may still break things, but it will be a cheaper/easier to fix mistake.
Switch modding is not an easy place to start, the newer something is, the smaller and closer together everything is.
Having the right tools for the job (not a cheap $10 soldering iron but a proper soldering station with temperature control) and watching soldering videos on YouTube from people that know how to solder to pick up some tips and techniques can make a huge difference to your soldering ability. You will gain confidence knowing you are doing things the right way, and as long as you have a steady hand, take your time, and you know your limits, with good technique you can do a lot.
Personally, I found watching videos from My Mate Vince and similar helped me improve my soldering ability more than any experience I gained doing soldering myself. He's not an expert, and he makes that clear, but he has good technique, and he shows the entire process thoroughly so his videos are easy to learn from. Especially some of his older videos, where he was still learning, and I felt I was learning along with him. On the other end of the spectrum are people like Louis Rossmann, experts at soldering but who don't show the entire process and use a lot of fancy tools that consumers won't have, if you already have a good grasp of soldering you can still pick up some tricks from their videos which may be useful for more advanced soldering.
All that being said, I am still not that confident when it comes to Switch modding, mainly as I can't easily afford to replace it if I were to break it. I did the GameCube and 360 without any problems, and if I didn't own a V1 unpatched Switch but had a V2 or Lite instead, I would probably take the plunge and do the modchip install despite my lack of confidence. But I'm certainly not confident enough to risk it on somebody else's Switch. I'm about 75% confident I would be able to do it as it doesn't look any harder than the RGH3 mod I did to my Falcon 360 (maybe even a little easier). The Switch OLED is a whole other beast though, I don't have high confidence in my ability to mod one of those (which is why I haven't bought one). I still don't have a ton of soldering experience, and most of my experience is on much easier things. Maybe a few dozen hours of soldering all in all. My soldering was absolute crap until I started actively following some repair/modding channels on YouTube and got myself a Hakko FX-888D to replace the old cheapo soldering iron.
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Xdqwerty:
