Fear the software guy with the soldering iron

Today, for the first time ever in my life, I used a soldering iron.

Remarkably, I neither conflagrated my house nor inflicted horrible burns on sensitive portions of my anatomy. Cat and wife are looking visibly relieved at this. As well they might.

I have a couple of Auria 27″ flatscreens that stopped working in a way that suggested it was due to the power supplies they were shipped with being pieces of shite. During the weekend we were building and qualifying the Great Beast of Malvern, my new friend Wendell disassembled one of them and tried replacing the capacitors, that being the overwhelmingly most likely failure point.

That didn’t work, but Wendell undertook to scare up replacement power supplies from one of his Asian business partners. Only it turns out there’s a funky thing about the cables on ‘em and he wants to salvage the old ones to attach to the new supplies.

I knew I had a soldering iron in a primitive electronics-repair kit someone gave me any years ago. Maybe I could desolder the cable so I don’t have to ship Wendell the heavy useless brick part? Challenge accepted!

And met. Took less time to melt the leads loose than it did to let the iron heat up sufficiently. It is only a small achievement, but broadening my range of skills always makes me happy.