Oh, the gods were angry at me last week. Very angry. They not only put me through the hell of completely destroying my computer (or so I thought), they also influenced me to exhibit my geek stubbornness and not replace anything, but instead break out the soldering iron and spend some frustrating hours soldering wire traces together that should never be attempted by mortal man.

In the end, I guess it was worth it. I mean that I stubbornly decided to fix things instead of junking my fantastic (and now old) computer. And I have the Zalman Reserator completely to blame for the whole thing.

The Zalman is a water cooling device that has no fans. Before, my computer had a total of 6 fans keeping it cool (CPU, Case, Graphics Card, and 3 in the power supply). Turning it on was similar to the noise of jet aircraft taking off from an aircraft carrier. Now it has just one, and it’s barely audible. The Zalman itself is inaudible and works flawlessly, so I feel somewhat bad for placing the blame on it. But how did this great travesty begin?

Due to the small yet real influence the angry gods had on me that fateful Thursday, my hand slipped as I installed the new heatsink of the Zalman onto the CPU, and suddenly a few copper traces were now exposed to the world in a way that god had not intended. They had, in fact, been severed by the edge of my needle nose pliers, and – as much as I tried to ignore the cut traces – the computer simply wouldn’t boot despite all of my anguished bleating. Yes, it was a sad time.

After a restless night of tossing and turning, dreams of soldering teeny tiny wires and conductive pens made for gnomes that could fix my sub-millimeter problems, I awoke the next day with newfound energy for fixing things, and putting my world back in order. I mean, how hard can it be to fix some silly wire traces coming from a CPU on a PCB? It’s got to be POSSIBLE, yes?

Now if I actually had some sort of measuring device to tell you how small these traces were, then I’d tell you. But I didn’t. My best guess is that they were 0.000001 mm wide. Well, they seemed that small anyway. Take a look at them – see the shiny colored copper areas? I had at this point scraped some of the coating off to inspect the damage and prepare for soldering.

Notice how there are two traces next to each other? Yes, that makes for a lot of fun – they are so close together that it’s not easy to get solder on just one trace without hitting the second one. To get an idea of the size of these traces, look at the socket on the left – the holes are for the CPU pins. The traces are less than half the width of the holes that the CPU pins fit into.Now if I actually had a soldering iron worth a damn, or some kind of PCB repair kit or a conductive pen with a tip the size of a mosquito’s schwanz, then I’d have been optimistic. But all I have at home is a Harry-Homeowner-I-Solder-Once-A-Year iron to work with. On the positive note, I can now tell you that it can be done. Even with crappy tools.

So here is what I had to do. First of all, I had to make a suitable tool to solder with – which meant taking that ugly soldering iron tip and sharpening it to a point. Any self respecting geek will have a dremel tool (or a cheap knockoff like me) with the appropriate grinder tip to do this with.

While certainly not the best tool, if you’re desperate like I was, then this will do. This is pretty easy to do.

The next thing to do was to rip apart a copper stranded cable and get a thin coating of solder onto several strands. This part is pretty easy as well – it just meant grabbing any old electric cord, chopping out a section, and then getting a coating of solder onto each of the strands.

At this point, things were going pretty well. But after this point, things got a lot hairier.

I don’t know if anyone in the world does this kind of PCB repair for a living, but one thing is certain – they probably have the correct tools to do it with. And they must also have a lot of patience.

I spent a few hours fiddling with these small wire strands and attempting to solder them to the broken traces. And yes, I was extremely pleased when I finally got the traces repaired. This involved touching the wires quickly with the iron while they were on top of the metal traces (to get them to initially stick) and then afterwards applying a small bead of solder to make sure that they stayed stuck in place. This was a lot harder than it sounds. But in the end, the wires were stuck. I mean, how geeky is that? Here is what my terrible soldering job looked like (there is a metal stud where the hole was in the previous picture).

Ugly, but functional (or so I thought). After getting finally getting a post, I quickly assembling things in my ignorant optimism – with it only to refuse post at all after the assembly was complete.

After another deconstruction, lots of coffee, re-heating the solder contacts, conductivity tests- it looked like things were actually going to work.

And here I am writing this blog entry on the one and the same, with those very horrifying looking solders (but with the naked eye you can’t really see how bad they look). And yes, I didn’t have any microscope or special magnifying tool to help with this.

So what’s the point? Perhaps I can at least encourage someone out there that has jammed a screwdriver into their motherboard to try to fix it, even if you only have primitive tools – there is at least one other person out there that has successfully done it

Of course, now that I’m concerned that the solder joints might “go bad” in the future, I guess it’s time to start looking for an upgrade. Now that I have a good reason, that is, I’m looking forward to it!

BTW, the Reserator works great, but one missing point in the instructions led to me sticking a tool in the computer in the first place, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. There is a mounting plate on the bottom of the motherboard directly below the CPU which has to be swapped when installing on a socket 939 board (in my case, with an ASUS board, it was glued on, so it took some careful prying to remove it). However, if you follow the picture instructions that come with the Reserator, you’ll install it upside down like I did, and then the nuts will pull through when you attempt to tighten the metal pegs that hold the heatsink bracket. And if you’re as unlucky as me, you might even cut some traces along the way.