Daily Archives: October 21, 2015
In For The Long Haul . . .
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Jan talked to one of the Company Men this morning, and right now it looks like we’ll be here until our optimum leave date of November 22nd. Rather than the workover rig up next as we’d been told before, flowback is coming in the next day or so, with the workover scheduled for a couple of weeks from now.
And we’re back on the gate starting tomorrow morning at 7am, so our brief respite is officially over. But in one last gasp of fun, we decided on another dinner out tonight.
After our morning coffee I started in on replacing the charger port on my ASUS laptop. As I figured it took me a little over an hour to get down to the base circuit board where the port was located. Here’s a pretty good video of the procedure if you’re interested.
Next up was to get the old port unsoldered from the board, and that proved to be much easier said than done.
The tip of my soldering iron is only 1/32” in width, but I still had trouble getting the tip and the solder wick in between the port and the parts on either side. I finally ended up using a pair of sharp cutter to clip the legs off so I could get the port case out of the way and get to the circuit board traces to clean off the old solder.
This should have been easy, but it seems they used some sort of high-temp solder on this board because my 100 watt iron had a hard time melting the solder joints to clean out the holes. My iron had no problem melting the rosin core solder I was using, so I know it was working OK.
By melting my solder on top of the circuit board joints, I was able to gradually dilute the high-temp stuff and get it off and the holes cleaned out so I could mount the new port. But because I had to take my time with this so I didn’t overheat the board, it took me several hours to finish this up.
By now it was getting close to dinner time, and finding I didn’t have rubbing alcohol to clean the sticky rosin gunk off the board, I put it aside until after supper.
And as far as dinner, where else but the Longhorn Grill for another great steak. And afterwards we were going to split a piece of their delicious Strawberry Cheesecake, but apparently it was so delicious that they were sold out. So instead we split an order of their Hot Peach Cobbler with Ice Cream. Also very good.
Coming home we made a quick stop at the HEB for a few things, including rubbing alcohol. Back at the rig I got back on the laptop project, cleaning off the rosin with the alcohol and preparing the board for the new part. Then the real problem started.
Although the Amazon listing said this port was OEM for the X53E (and several other similar models), it did not fit my board. The lead spacing was slightly wrong, and the leads themselves were too big for the holes in the board.
So for right now, I’m stuck with my laptop in pieces until I can come up with a solution. I could try another Amazon listing from a different vendor, or I might be able to come up with a kluge using pieces of wire to make new legs, or maybe using sharp cutters to trim the leads down to fit the circuit board holes
But I’ll have to think on it overnight.
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Thought for the Day:
Knowledge is knowing how, Wisdom is knowing when.
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