Hacking Did you have soldering experience?

quadomatic · Feb 22, 2008

Just wondering, as I was hoping to see whether I could give myself a confidence boost with installing YAOSM myself. Hopefully this helps others too.

Also, was your mod successful? So many people report having DREs after installing their chips, and it scares me!

yuyuyup · Feb 22, 2008

I successfully dropped 4 solder dots onto xbox TSOP spots in a very amateur manner, unsuccessfully TSOP attempted my friend's xbox (didn't break it though) and that was my solder experience before successfully doing 2 wiikeys. Anyone that can maintain a steady hand can do it, just make sure to have a low wattage iron, thinass resincore solder, and do it all properly (clean then tin your iron tip, proper solder methods, etc)

azzytee · Feb 22, 2008

I didn't have experience, used an old, bad, high wattage iron and lifted three pads. Waited a few months, bought the proper iron, solder, flux, desoldering braid, and most important - magnifying glass. I practiced soldering onto the legs of a memory chip DIMM for three hours, then successfully installed my wiikey, to legs - internal gecko & internal wavebird. yay.

hanman · Feb 22, 2008

i'm a computer/electronics technician, so i had plenty of experience before i got started. i've got two tips for you. first, practice on something with very small solder points that you don't care about. the smaller, the better. second, use flux. it makes a huge difference.

quadomatic · Feb 22, 2008

QUOTE(hanman @ Feb 21 2008 said:
i'm a computer/electronics technician, so i had plenty of experience before i got started.Â i've got two tips for you.Â first, practice on something with very small solder points that you don't care about.Â the smaller, the better.Â second, use flux.Â it makes a huge difference.

How do I use flux?

klyick · Feb 22, 2008

I had experience in the sense that I had soldered before, but I had never tried anything this small. I had a crappy 15W iron, and flux core solder.

Thankfully, I found these forums at that time, and decided I needed lots of practice, because if I screwed up my Wii, I wasn't getting another.
I practiced for about 4-6 hours on various old electric junk (old sound cards, motherboards, and other crap) until I had a method that would not lift solder pads(the little metal pieces that the traces connect to). I lifted quite a few before I got it right. I also read all the helpful information here, so I would know every pitfall.

Then I took the plunge, did the deed, and now have a modded Wii that has worked ever since, which is about a year.

-Klyick

P.S. I have a lamp/magnifying glass, could not have done it without.

yatzr · Feb 22, 2008

I'm an electrical engineer. When I was an intern, I constantly had to modify prototypes. That involved soldering on stuff as small as 402 resistors and caps (402 means .04" x .02") which I usually had to do without a magnifying glass. On the wii, we've got those nice massive test pads to solder onto...very easy.

arctic_flame · Feb 22, 2008

The no to yes ratio at the moment really, really disturbs me...

(Needless to say, I had experience, used a powerful iron and no flux. tinned the wires, touched everything together for 0.1 of a second, done. I don't recommend doing this if you have no experience though!)

paOol · Feb 23, 2008

is flux different from resin-core solder? and what is tinning the wires?

anyways, i had a little bit of experience before i installed mine. i practiced on an old firewire PCI card, a old modem which i took apart, and a battery re-charger (wayyy old one). i just soldered wires and eventually learned a "technique". i basically have the iron in my right hand, and the cut up wire on my left hand. i tap my iron against a little bit of solder for less than a second so i get like a drop on it. then i hold the iron against the solder pad on the dvd drive and it melts within 1 second (15watt iron) and i stick the wire in and hold for about another second. then i remove the iron while my left hand is still. it cools in about 1 second and its done.

Hacking Did you have soldering experience?

Did you have soldering experience when you modded your Wii?

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