Tutorial: Solder the New clipped chips (Repost)

[jenko]

By deenizzle

This tutorial is to help the thousands of people out there thinking they cant solder the newly shipped wii with clipped chips. It looks very tough because the points are so small but if you use the right tools you will be able to solder to those points easily.

I try to make my tutorials easy to follow and I use tools the the common person has or can get.

What you'll need:

Soldering Iron
Soldering skills
Flux (I use Sterling premium lead-free water soluble Flux.home depot $8 16oz)
IDE cable (cable that connects Hard drives and CD-Roms to the motherboard)
Razor
Q-Tip
Patience***

INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Grab your IDE cable cut off the molex end in a straight line with a razor (figure 1)
2.cut vertically down the IDE to seperate 3 wires from the rest (figure 2)
3.seperate those 3 wires and strip them down so the copper is showing (figure 3)
4. make sure the copper wire is straight
5. with a Q-Tip apply a fare amount of flux to a copper wire

6. put a very little amount of solder on your iron and coat the copper with solder just enough where you cant see the copper color anymore and it looks silver (this is called tinning). there should be no lumps or thick pieces of solder on the wire. shouldnt look any thicker really at all.

7.now with your Q-Tip put a very healthy amount of flux on the clipped chip in the area where you'll be soldering. (this will help you from bridging and connecting any wires on accedent) you CAN put enough flux where you cant even see where you'll be soldering to. the more the better. if you dont put enough on you could risk bridging some points etc.

8. (for right handers) with your left hand hold the wire pointing at the chip straight up and down .start with the left most point- line the wire up so its parallel with the leg to its left (so they are almost touching)

9. with your Iron gradually get closer to the wire so that the flux is starting to melt and disolve. after a couple seconds you should be able to see if its lined up correctly through the disolving flux.

10. when you see its lined up straight and close to the leg to the left, with your iron push on the wire (apply a firm amount of pressure right where the point would be, you should hear some sizzling of the flux and when you pull off, the wire should stick) (figure 4)
**This may take several tries to get right so be PATIENT

11. REPEAT steps 6-10 for the next 2 wires.

12. When this is done it should look similar to Figure 5. now that should give you enough space to solder like normal. you can bend the wires around and solder them right to the chip or just solder right from the copper you have already exposed.

13. make sure you follow the traces back to the pads so you know what traces/pad goes to what part of the chip your installing.

14. good luck, have fun

(i am unable to post URLs since i have under 15 posts so you may want to save the attachment and zoom in with your picture viewer)

Hopefully this tutorial will help everyone out there to get back to soldering the chips. I also have another tutorial over at xbox-scene on how to fix the 3 red lights. If either of these help you please post in either forum (xbox-scene name is kidderboots -tutorial is the 3 penny fix)
Also if you would like to help me continue with these tutorials you can donate any amount to my paypal account Deenizzle@hotmail.com

Thanks in advance to everyone who tries this and make sure you post your results!