It's a bit deceiving under the microscope, what looks like a ton of flux may be the size of matchstick head. Of course if you haven't repaired anything before this all looks like rocket science.
But I personally can't stand nutjob banter in any form, I've met so many idiots talking BS before, now I just switch off when they open their mouth or start repeating themselves.
You should really, really watch is videos about why reballing and BGA rework in general is the evil himself..
And then proceeds to charge 350$ to repair boards with used components pulled from dead boards that he says he buys by the pallet at 20$ a piece, some of his soldering is a bit awfull, but its a good bed time rant to start sleeping.
One thing to keep in mind here is context. Over half of the components I replace are not available for purchase at any price on the open market. I either take it off a donor board, or I put a wire where a MOSFET used to be, and the latter isn't helping anyone long term.
The second is the end user. I used to work for a large facility debugging electronic devices that were used in everyday sessions. People opened a trouble ticket, I figured out what was wrong, I fixed it. This could take an hour.. a day, a month, six months. The key performance indicator here was not time to complete a repair. So long as I took a spare piece of gear from the gear room and put it in the control room, where the broken device used to sit, I was fine to take as long as I needed. I had the luxury of buying new replacement components, which were often very standardized tubes, resistors, and transistors. No one was "waiting" on me.
Where I work, we are dealing with devices that belong to an end user that wants to know when it will be done before they walk in the door. When they walk in the door, they want it to be done right then and there... as if nothing else were in the queue. They have no concept of the idea that there is advanced troubleshooting going into this process, and even when they do; they don't really care. It's Manhattan. These people are filmers, stockbrockers, business owners, accountants. They need it back.
Now! as Jack bauer would say.
Practical reality dictates if I have to replace 30 components in an isolated area, I will spend 10x as much time looking up each component value, finding its spool, removing it from its spool, soldering it on, etc, then I will just grabbing 30 identical components from an identical donor board. If I were to do my job at the pace of a facility that can do things
"by the book" on their own time, I would not have services to offer my target demographic. Heck, I wouldn't have a demographic, I'd have a cardboard box to sleep in; no one's waiting months and months for me to fix one board.
Now, for this system of using parts from donor boards to work, it comes down to two rules. The first rule is to
know what is wrong with your donor boards! I cannot stress this enough. Buying liquid damaged donor boards to fix your boards is a BAD IDEA!!! Buying donor boards off of EBAY is a BAD IDEA!!! Anything could be damaged or destroyed on these boards, or semi-damaged and waiting to go out. Buy boards that are donors because they had a bad CPU, or bad PCH, or broken via inside from the manufacturing process. These boards will allow for good component selection.
The second rule is to consider when 100% new is the only thing that will do. If this were a graphics chip, a PCH, a CPU, no way would I install a used chip. That is akin to used underwear, and disgusting. They are terrible chips to begin with half the time, degrading by the minute in the high heat environment they are placed in, and are lucky to make it to three years. A MOSFET or 10 ohm resistor here and there, particularly on low power lines, that is going to last 20-30 years. They will be just fine looooooooong after everything else in that POS is dead. I'd liken those used items to something like an extension cord... not new, but not something you would "ewww" at using as much as someone else's used underwear.
Warranty on all of these board repairs, if they do come back, is often because the liquid damaged primary problem caused a secondary problem somewhere down the line that wasn't anticipated. In many of these videos, I go over sequence and basic best practices for troubleshooting so repairs last long term. Not just fixing the primary problem, but a manner of thinking where you know what caused your primary problem and what other secondary problems are waiting for you a week down the line. Videos such as the newbies fixing vcore circuit or the many videos on BKL_EN go over these basic concepts. It really is up to the skill and discretion of the person doing the job whether or not the work done is going to last or fall apart in a week. You can usually easily tell whose stuff is lasting and whose is dying a month in. I don't anonymize the videos so viewers are free to look up my track record and see if they feel I'm worth taking advice from.
In terms of flux, it is a bad habit to use too much. Too much beats too little, though, and if you work on 10 layer PCBs that are designed to dissipate heat like these ones, it can be difficult to get a well flowed joint. I feel like a monster whenever I use the same setup on any standard PCB, like I'm going to set it on fire with one touch - so I always have to tone everything down when I work on "normal" product. Most of these boards make a final trip through the ultrasonic cleaner with distilled water and branson EC before they make their way back to customers to remove flux residues.
It's one thing to be frustrated with awful customers. It's another to air your dirty laundry on YouTube like that. Not that I think he's a bad person for it, but he sure as hell sounds like one and I find it exceedingly unpleasant to watch. After seeing this I'd never consider being one of his customers.
This also requires context. The video in question here is one of over five hundred, one of maybe four or five where I discuss deplorable practices in our field in the manner I did. Here, we arrive at the crux of the issue.
To you, I am insulting the customer - the technician who sent this device in for repair.
To me, the technician who represented himself as a qualified member of the electronics repair community, is insulting the customer. He butchered an otherwise perfectly fixable motherboard, shortening its lifespan and potentially destroying it for no good reason. The *REAL* customer is the end user of the device who decided to bring this to a repair store. That is who I have concern for. Not the foolish individual that decided to try to make a quick buck with no concern for the $1000 product he has no idea how to service. I spend about 25-30 hours a week additional on top of my work week to make this content available so people like him are armed with the knowledge, tools, and mindset to do this work properly. It's made available for
free. What if the customer can't afford to purchase a new one? What if this "technician's" actions caused irreversible damage to a device someone else cannot afford to replace? The customer - the real customer - is the person with whom my sympathy lies in this situation.
In the field I work in, there has been a persistent rumor ever since the NVIDIA 52xx days of 12 years ago that you heatgun the video chip when you have no video(or the MCP from the MCP6* days when there is no power/wifi) and that rumor is about as widespread and untrue as WMDs in Iraq. I am trying to hammer into the heads of a very specific niche audience to not do this. An audience that has been told that
this is repair for over a decade! It is downright harmful to the gear. It hurts the reputation of everyone in our industry when people who claim to be experts do these terrible things. Customers come back with broken devices and they lose confidence in our craft. They see us as shysters and they create negative mental assocations for the word "refurbished."
iFixit themselves have videos showing you how to fix motherboards using a home depot paint stripper. WildPCS charges $1600 to teach a week-long course where they remove components from cellphones with a $25 wagner heatgun. I've spent seven years politely posting and attempting to educate people on how this makes things worse, and people still do it. Not only will the service center do this, but they'll send it here for repair AFTER they do that, and demand full warranty when something that
they fried fails. They will fry this gear using tactics I have politely campaigned against for seven years, then have the gall to say
yeah we found you from your blog/youtube/guides on XYZ forum, we love your content! This is where
context is key. On year 7 of being ignored, I'll make a comment in a video about it.
It won't be a nice one, and there is reason for it. To the new viewer of my content, starting on this specific 1 of 500+ videos, it seems like an unwarranted bashing of an unsuspecting individual. To someone who has been following the last few years of videos, the years of blogging and forum posts prior to me posting a YouTube channel, it is completely different. My English teacher says "stop talking" differently the first time than he does the twentieth time in class; the same way I will say
stop heatgunning the $50 PCH before you've checked for a short to ground on the primary power rail of the machine like I discussed in 57 videos prior differently the seventh year in.
The way I discuss things might detract people, but they're welcome to find another source to figure this out. Seven years ago I would have killed for someone on YT to have laid everything out before I bashed my brain against the wall to figure out whether VCCIO or vcore came first or to discuss the relationship between RTC clock and PM_SLP signals. I still can't find a place on the internet where people answer
my questions on sequence of signals for the series 9 PCH, and I'm willing to pay! Since starting the channel I've seen a huge uprise in people who send in devices they have completely butchered(ironically, ignoring all the advice and techniques I show in the videos). If I am shedding customers as a result of the comments, it's working.
I don't want that business to begin with.
I work in an industry filled with people that just one year ago, charged $250 to fix an iPhone 6 screen with a knockoff part, when Apple did the same job with original screen for $109. They were 100% against telling the customer they could pay half the price and get a better part by walking one block down the street. A lot of the people in this industry do indeed need to get slapped on the wrist when they do something stupid; and there is no shortage of that stupid in our business. The individual who drastically shortened the life of this motherboard did so for a customer of theirs that
thought they were giving their $1000 device to a qualified individual. Technicians who avoid all resources and all logic before taking drastic, negligent, foolish action contribute to why the end consumer hates technology professionals and electronics repairers in general, while contributing nothing to the field. These issues are a big part of why we are not taken seriously by the companies that produce this hardware, and a big part of why we are unable to obtain support from the manufacturers. That s something I seek to change. This starts with weeding out a lot of the ignorance in our own ranks.
The point of this channel was to create a community of well informed technicians armed with techniques, methodologies, and mindsets that can make them a living; as well as allow them to be taken seriously by the professional community. This content was designed to speak to the me of 17 years ago. I want to be able to sit that guy down in front of this channel, have him watch every video, and avoid making a lot of mistakes in repairs, business, and life. I want the 30,000 people currently watching to have that benefit and to accelerate their own learning. That is my goal. They can hate me, what I stand for, how I present... I don't care. Coming off as a lovable character was never on the priorities list. If it dissuades the people watching from using paint strippers on $1000 devices, mission accomplished!
The chips until 2008 had significantly different underfill, and this can be seen with the naked eye(is much brighter). Beyond 2009 has changed underfill. Is it used chip puled from motherboard maded 2007? You do the math.
Time machine?
I'm not asking for a guide on identifying them.
Where do I buy these brand new chips from a reputable distributor?
When I find out I'll let you know.
The biggest problem in this business is that my box of boards with holes in them
IS the "reputable distributor."
I did get to meet several assemblymen, assemblywomen, and senators last May while lobbying with some amazing folk for the Right to Repair bill in Albany. If this legislation goes forward, manufacturers would be forced to provide SOME level of support to third parties that want to do component level repair. I am very excited about this! With things like Error 53 in the news(which, btw, thousands of people had never even heard of until the video that was linked to on
this class action lawsuit page), we are one step closer to reaching that goal.
Yes you are right. The point is that most are available, contrary to what Luis said.
Look at that supposedly "new" chip you got from SEEIC or ebest under a microscope and tell me if you think it's new.
When NVIDIA, AMD, Intersil, and Intel start selling chips to us that are guaranteed new, and binned properly - I'll buy it. Until then.... it's just a bunch of dumpster diving, finger crossing, and praying that anything is actually new. Good luck giving most of the "new" GPUs on the market to people who use their machine for video editing or anything graphics intensive.
For any type of large BGA rework, too much flux is indeed a bad thing. On any large chip BGA rework video I do, I actually apply flux only to the balls of the chip itself through the stencil. Too much flux under the chip will cause it to move around and become misaligned during soldering which is absolutely no good.
When customers receive back machines that last for 14 weeks, they lose confidence in what we do. We get labeled the low quality, "Caveat emptor" option, which I'd like to change. Encouraging people to really think about where these chips come from is a great part of that change.
it doesnt show, thats what ultrasonic bath is for. You can tell what part of the board was worked on only by non patinated solder joints/bodges around.
Did you read studies about electronic pcbs and ultrasonic baths? If you are not very carefull and restrict time and power you can do damage to the components solderconnections.
100% true if you use industrial glass cleaner at 100c(which one of my clients was doing for three years before sending boards to me), which, while we're on the topic here, resulted in this next arrogantly perceived video.
After three years of telling other people how to do their job better so that they
DON'T have to give me money, you might find yourself with the same attitude exhibited in this video.
If you follow some basic common sense and use cleaning agents that will not destroy the materials you are putting in them, ultrasonicing is a good thing to do. I like to keep it around 55c, 100 mL of branson EC for every gallon of distilled water, and about one minute per side. The only boards that come out dead are boards whose solder connections amounted to 1/4 or 1/8 of a pad after the rest was corroded. Yes, it did suck to have to spend 40 minutes tracking that down and fixing it properly but it sure beats having the customer come back when that 1/8 of a pad breaks off in the middle of a presentation they were giving to 200 people.