Yet another holiday has approached and nearly passed now, and it wasn’t clear if I was going to be able to celebrate it or not. This is going to take some setting up, so bear with me (he says, to all the nonexistent readers.)
Some time back, I was reaching for something that had fallen on the floor and fell out of my chair, mostly because the floor in Walkabout Studios is tile and the chair skids too easily. I was fine, no broken hips or anything, but I found out a little later on that I’d crashed into the front of the computer (full mini-tower unit in a cubby under the desk,) and had broken my right-angle headphone adapter. Soon afterward, I discovered that I’d also damaged the socket itself, set into the face of the computer, and the right channel (ear) no longer worked. Crud.
I took the faceplate off and examined it, but nothing was visibly wrong, which meant that the damage was within the socket assembly itself. This was soldered onto a circuit board that screwed onto the back of the faceplate. No choice but to replace the socket.
Now, this is a simple and fairly common part, a 3.5mm female stereo jack. Except this one was soldered vertically to the board, which is rarer, and had five connections, also rare – both together are actually hard to find. I eventually located one from Aliexpress, a Chinese company, and let me stop you right there; I know that this is of questionable quality and somewhat risky, but it was a few bucks and the only other place I’d found it from was many times the price with the same apparent lead time, to say nothing of the fact that they were probably just a reseller and obtained their parts from the same damn place – these things aren’t ever made in the US. I’d ordered countless parts and upgrades for the 3D printer, as well as many other electronics, through Aliexpress and it always went fine. I placed the order, knowing it would likely be two weeks or so.
Or, not. Tracking the package found that, a few days after the order, it made it to a ‘sorting center’ in China and then stalled. For 20 days. I figured it was something to do with tariffs, but at least tell me something. However, it finally started moving again, and I was notified that, as of today, it was out for delivery, just shy of a month after placing the order. Sheesh.
But okay – I had another repair to do, to a remote release for the camera, and so I semi-scheduled them together. That repair went quite well, including printing a new stress-relief on the 3D printer out of TPU, a flexible material that I’d been unable to print successfully before. Cool! Finished that, and awaited the mail delivery. By early afternoon I finally had my package in hand.
Only to find that it contained a crushed, empty box inside a sealed delivery envelope. Lovely. You know, all they had to do was inform me that the order was lost or damaged and had been re-shipped, but apparently they were counting on me never bothering to try and get a refund or something (that’s already been applied for.)
But, what to do about the headphones? I’m handy, but there was no reasonable way to use a different jack, such as a side-mounted one, because there was no space and you needed the solid mount to push against when inserting the plug anyway. However, the board also had a microphone jack right alongside it, which I never used because they suck and my kickass microphone is a USB model. So could I simply swap the jacks out?
Easier typed than done. When items are soldered to a circuit board, it’s a quick thing, a mere touch with the hot solder, but de-soldering them takes a lot more time and heat, plus the fact that the hot solder doesn’t just fall away helpfully, but remains in contact (even with a solder vacuum tool) and re-hardens almost immediately. Ideally, you want all of the connections heated simultaneously so the socket can be drawn away while the solder is fluid, but this is next to impossible. Meanwhile, repeated heating transfers into the plastic housing for the socket, and it’s very easy to melt the damn thing enough to wreck it.
Which is what happened to the old headphone socket – it was already damaged, so no loss, but it told me that I’d have to be extra-careful with the one I was removing from the microphone side. So I took my time, cycling around the five pins to give each time to cool, wiggling it out a tiny bit at a time until it was free. Switching over a few millimeters and soldering it back in place took no time at all, and as noted, only a momentary touch of hot solder to the fluxed contacts re-affixed it.
And it works perfectly, so time well spent (and it was damn near an hour,) which means that I have celebrated, rather than ignored, today’s holiday, which is Overcome Absurd Obstacles Day. How about you?