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by Knufferlbert 1495 days ago
Reminds me of the "myth" of putting a Radeon GPU into the oven on low heat for a while if it was broken. I tried it when mine stopped working and indeed it fixed it.

Also another Radeon card was identical as a more powerful one, except that two pins (maybe wrong word) were not connected. I drew the connection using a pencil directly on the board and it worked as well, saving around 100 Euros.

It's over a decade ago, so details may be slightly wrong. But still interesting how low tech solutions worked on such complicated machinery.
1 comments
logbiscuitswave 1495 days ago
What you did was reflow the solder. This isn’t an uncommon technique for amateur/small batch repairs or assembly of surface mount circuit boards. At the maker space I use, there’s a toaster oven dedicated to this task.

That being said, you don’t want to use that oven for food purposes anymore. Lots of toxic chemicals will off-gas in the reflow process.

ETA this reminds me of the Xbox 360 “red ring of death” fiasco. One DIY repair technique was to wrap the entire Xbox in towels blocking all the ventilation. The theory was the resulting overheating would reflow the failing BGA solder joints. I don’t know if this really worked or was anecdotal but it was one I remember seeing a lot.

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ars 1495 days ago
> you don’t want to use that oven for food purposes anymore. Lots of toxic chemicals will off-gas in the reflow process.

Just run the oven at full heat for an hour and you are fine - the same process that off-gassed the chemicals in the first place, will also deplete them from the oven when you run it later. (Keep the vent on, or ventilate the kitchen.)

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a1369209993 1494 days ago
You can also stick a fume sucker[0] in the (cold) oven for a hour.

But with either approach, make sure nothing dripped and landed on the bottom of the oven chamber (or worse, the corner seams or the space under the chamber), since that can stick around and keep outgassing for months or years.

0: A length of dryer hose with a salvaged PC cooling fan on one end and the other out a window - usually used to ventilate solder fumes.

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