I don’t normally do board level repairs on my YouTube channel, but I have a friend
who is exceptional at it.
Today he’s going to show us how to fix a MacBook that doesn’t turn on and has been
water damaged.
Let’s go.
We’re going to be checking out a MacBook Air that doesn’t turn on and has a little
bit of liquid damage on it.
We’re going to see if we can make it work.
You just got to take the board out of here before we can get started under the microscope
cuz if we don’t, it will burn the black plastic over there.
So this tri-c over here is the SMC reset chip.
So the SMC is powered off of 3.4 volts, however if you try to power it before 3.42 volts is
stabilized…So this little 3.42 volts apply over here.
It takes a second to get to 3.42.
If the SMC tries to turn on before then, it will crash and not work.
And that’s what is most likely causing this to not turn on.
So once we replace this and the corrosion parts around it, hopefully it will work again.
So I’m going to remove the old IC.
I’m putting some flux on which is going to help the solder flow.
We’re going to take off this capacitor which looks pretty nasty and then this chip which
doesn’t look very nice as well.
Alright.
Now I’m just going to wick away some of the old solder here.
We’re going to add some fresh solder to the pads.
Hopefully you guys viewing at home have steadier hands than I do, but if somebody tells you
that you can’t solder cuz you don’t have steady hands, now you know not to believe
them.
We’re going to take the chip off of one of my trusty donor boards.
See, that’s a beautiful donor board right here.
So we’re going to remove the chip from this board.
Okay, so this is going to go like this.
Now the way I know is that pin 1 is over here and there’s a little dot on the chip right
over here that gives away that that’s pin 1.
And that chip got destroyed.
Now that chip actually burned completely as I was putting it on – like just went up
in smoke.
Yeah, that’s a good one.
Let’s try this again.
Yeah, you should.
On live stream I can’t add it so people just watch and laugh.
Okay I’m going to try to situate that right where it’s supposed to sit.
And there’s a little bit of a solder blob there, sorry.
I put too much on the center pad which is a mistake which I know that nobody watching
is going to make cuz you just watched me make it.
Um hm.
Now the capacitor that I almost forgot about.
We’re going to put that on there.
And just to make sure that flows into place, add a little bit of flux and the capacitor
will find its own space naturally.
There we go.
Alright so now we can clean it up with a little bit of alcohol.
And the disgusting chip works fine, where as the clean chip almost killed my board.
It’s going to spin on and off, on and off three times before it finally finishes and
turns on.
But yeah, that’s it.
[Zack] So that was really fun for me to watch but I don’t plan on doing very many board level
repairs on my channel, but luckily we have guys like Louis here who have a TON of videos.
How many videos do you have on your channel?
[Louis] About 250 on board repair.
[Zack] That’s incredible.
And you do mostly laptops or cellphones?
[Louis] Mostly MacBooks...
Some iPhone data recoveries from you know, the ocean, the toilet, yeah.
[Zack] Nice!
So I’m going to leave the board level repairs to him, and I’ll stick with the component
level repairs on my channel.
[Louis] And if something is not fixable you’ll always get to see what we do to finish it
off.
Thank you to Kyle at iFixit for sending us this lovely souvenir.
[Zack] And before we go there’s one more thing I want to show you.
Louis, what the heck is down here?
What is that?
[Louis] Um, uhhhhhhhh, spare parts?
[Zack] That is the graveyard…the motherboard graveyard.
[Louis] That’s all for you.
It’s your turn.
[Zack] No, no way.
[Louis] Yeah, take this.
It’s house fire maybe?
[Zack] Wow that looks terrible.
[Louis] Yeah, spare parts.