Hi All,

I am going to attempt an A500 Plus repair (The dreaded Battery Leak)

Attached is a photo of the issue  - Question is has anyone attempted this and if so how difficult does this repair job look ?

If anyone has the time to look and advise then thank you in advance

It seems C12 will need to be replaced but cannot find it anywhere is there an alternative i can use ?

U12 + U13 replacements have been ordered.

http://imgur.com/j2L7lyd


Thanks

Chris.

C12 is the same rating as C10 and C11 over to the left. Its just a simple capacitor. You can use any thats rated the same as it is. It doesnt have to look like that one. As for the rest of the repairs dont try to repair the traces, they are much to hard to fix on the board. Just get some very thin solid copper wire wrap wire and use it to jumper between the bad spots.

Thanks for the information guys:)

Would you say individual wires from an ethernet cable be suitable for the bypass wiring ?

Yeah that will work as long as your using a single strand and not multiple strands. Also you will want to use something like conformal coating or epoxy to cover it up. You don't want bare wires touching other things. I prefer to use wire wrap wire since its very thing and covered with insolation.

Try wire wrap wire.  Very thin, insulated and not too hard to work with.  I've redone several traces with it.

And you can even find it at Radio Shack!

That doesn't look too bad at all, just scrub it with vinegar to neutralize the battery electrolyte and then rinse with alcohol or distilled water and dry thoroughly. Those capacitors are just bypass caps on the power rails to the ICs, they are probably 0.1uF (100n), anything you can find that looks similar will have a high enough voltage rating. You probably don't even need to replace it, in most cases equipment will still work with one or two of those missing depending on where they are in the circuit. Even the IC's may well be fine once you clean off the corrosion, I had one that had way more blue corrosion than that on the pins and it still tested fine after I cleaned it.

I highly recommend kynar insulated wire wrap wire for fixing damaged traces. You can form it neatly and use dabs of hot glue to hold it down when you're finished. It's what they used for fixing PCB errors in the factory back in in the days before CAD mostly eliminated them.

Not necessarily. You should scrub the solder mask off the discolored traces and scrub or scrape off the corrosion until you get clean copper. If the trace is not broken then it's probably ok but you should verify with a multimeter. The most vulnerable area are vias, these are tiny plated through holes used to pass the signal from one side of the board to the other. Electrolyte gets into those and rots out the plating leaving an open circuit. You'll want to remove any affected ICs to clean and inspect underneath them too. Be careful because the corrosion affects the solder and seems to raise the melting point. Unless you have a vacuum desoldering tool you might consider cutting the legs off the ICs and remove the pins one at a time, but only do this on cheap commodity chips that are easily replaced. It's easy to tear up the board and turn a small job into a big job.

Thanks for the tip, got one roll of Kynar wire off eebay... Definitely will make neater repairs.

Perfect choice!

Yes, good point about wire stripper. Maybe should get job done with razor blade knife if wire stripper won't do.